Re: PGP/MIME integration

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> Is my tin setup just poor, or does tin have really poor PGP/MIME
> support?

sort of the later, this has several reasons:
a) pgp-signing of messages (either in the old way that tin currently
   proudces or via MIME-sections like it's done in mutt) isn't very
   welcome in most groups on usenet and thus it's usualy not done at
   all
b) if posts are signed (i.e. control messages) this is done via so
   called header signing. unfortunately there is no propper draft or
   RFC for that. the method is clever but the inital format which was
   choosen isn't (the header caries some useless date (pgp-version)
   but is missing some which would be usefull (which algorithm was
   used).

> I haven't (yet?) found any option to tell tin to properly
> MIME encode messages when signing them.  Also, is there a way to have

as multipart messages are usualy not very welcome on usenet we didn't
implement that (yet). the "old-style" pgp-support was written before
the MIME-section stuff came up.

> tin automatically sign messages, rather than manually requesting it
> for each and every message?  Additionally, can tin automatically

sort of: via header signing by using tinews.pl (included in the
source-tarball in the tools-dir) as (built-in) inews replacement.
tinews.pl will only work if you are reading/posting news via NNTP,
but that is the common use - it doesn't work when you are reading
directly from the local spool.

> verify PGP/MIME signatures when reading messages?

no, for traditional signed messages you have to manually invoke it
via '^G', for MIME-signed messages you have to pipe ('|') the article
through something which is able to veryif the signature. for header
signed articles you have to pipe the article through pgpverify (not
included in the tin source, but i.e. in the source of inn and on the
isc.org ftp-server).

> For an example of what I want, try mutt.  mutt is a mail agent, not
> newsreader, so it isn't a replacement for tin, but its PGP/MIME
> support is superb and does just what I want tin to do.

multipart mime mesages are common in mail and usualy not disliked by
ppl. so of course there are more clients which support it (not all of
them are as good as mutt).

> Alternatively, for composing messages, do any scripts already exist
> that will invoke $EDITOR first then PGP/MIME encode the body before
> giving the message back to tin for posting?

tinews.pl does something like that (but it doesn't put the pgp-data
in a mime-part, it uses the X-PGP-Sig header).

> What about preprocessing messages before displaying them in the pager?

currently there is no way to do that (a few years ago some announced
perl-hooks for tin, but I never saw his beta code. I guess he gave
up. perl-hooks for certain actions are on my TODO-list, but with a
very very low priority).

> This could be used to verify signatures, as well as using t-prot to
> hide line-noise (like bad top-posting and list trailers).

urs
-- 
"Only whimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff
 on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" - Linus