Re: Possibility of plugin for Mozilla/Thunderbird?

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Eric S. Johansson wrote:
> frequently plug-ins do not give you the right kind of control to do "the
> right thing".  The ones I have looked at do not let you create
> background processing so users don't need to see stamp generation.

On the other hand, Enigmail (for Mozilla and Thunderbird) uses GnuPG on
the backend; users occasionally see error messages which one normally
only sees on the command line, but that's the exception rather than the
rule.

That said, I haven't looked at the guts of Enigmail at all, and have
only recently started looking at the guts of hashcash. (I ran across an
article on reusable proof-of-work tokens on Slashdot a few weeks ago,
and found hashcash.org through that. In fact, it was wondering whether
an Enigmail-like plugin could be created that brought me to this list.
Nice to be here, btw. :))

> It would be interesting to play with camram 0.4.<dammit I
> found another bug> and build a client side stamping engine.

I think the question is more one of whether to integrate stamping into
the MTA or the MUA, the latter of which is of course the point of
designing a plugin. I know that camram's emailrelay handles the stamping
at the MTA level, and of course it's far nicer to be able to stop spam
there; but not everyone admins their own MTA.

(No reason not to do both, natch.)

> I'm not intending to discourage, I just want you to know a little
> something about the terrain.  If you want to do the camram route, I will
> be glad to give you some help.

For my part, I'm glad to learn anything I can. Following Mitch Denny's
remarks on using hashcash with blogs, I've been thinking about working
up an XSLT implementation, though I think before that I'm going to try a
Python port, just to get more familiar with the algorithm.

<relurk/>

Cheers,
Meredith L. Patterson
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