Re: PGP/GPG and AOL

[Jack Twilley <jmt+usenet@twilley.org>]

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

Jack> I helped an AOL user install WinPT on her machine, but when she
Jack> sent me an encrypted message, Gnus and gpg.el didn't DTRT.

Simon> Could you give some more details on what Gnus/gpg.el did and
Simon> did not do?

Jack> What Gnus and gpg.el did not do was to take the content of
Jack> either part of the multipart message and offer to decrypt it and
Jack> display the decrypted contents.

Simon> What happened instead?  What was displayed?  Did `K b' help?

Nothing happened.  What was displayed was the PGP-encrypted message.
When I used `K b', it offered me a choice between text/plain (what was
displayed) and text/html (which I can't view anyway until I get w3
working).

Jack> Turns out that AOL sends multipart messages -- text and HTML --
Jack> and there's no known way to force it to send only text.

Simon> Shouldn't be a problem.

Jack> You'd think.  I've got an open case with AOL because first and
Jack> second level helpdesk folks weren't able to tell me how to do
Jack> that.

Simon> Oh, I meant it shouldn't be a problem for Gnus.  To get AOL to
Simon> do something is probably more difficult, yes. :-)

I suspect the check to see if we need to do fun PGP stuff should be
moved to after choosing which part to display and displaying it.  But
then again, I don't know which place is the right place, as one could
conceivably encrypt a multipart message.  Both, perhaps?

Jack> Does anyone out here have an easy way to have Gnus and gpg.el
Jack> check the contents of a multipart message to see if they're
Jack> encrypted, and offer to decrypt them?

Simon> Gnus should do this by default, controlled by
Simon> `mm-decrypt-option'.

Jack> Mine's set to nil, which means "ask user" according to the docs.
Jack> I was not asked.

Simon> Then Gnus didn't regard it as encrypted, which could be a bug.

Sounds good to me.

Simon> The best would be if you could arrange to send a encrypted mail
Simon> from the AOL account to bugs@gnus.org and I could try to see
Simon> what is wrong.

Would it be acceptable for me to forward the received message?

Jack> While the "right" solution is to fix AOL, the more probable
Jack> solution seems to be to fix Gnus or gpg.el -- does anyone know
Jack> what's wrong or how to fix it?  I'll help debug the problem if
Jack> people can give me generic pointers on just what to do, as I'm
Jack> unfamiliar with this particular subsystem.

Simon> The generic hint is to use elp-instrument-package to find out
Simon> which functions are called when you display the message, and
Simon> then edebug some of likely functions to find out what is
Simon> happening. (Functions named *crypt*, *secur* are good
Simon> candidates, if you can't find any, just edebug everything in
Simon> mm-*.el.)  It takes some time to get to know the code though.

Okay, I'll poke about a bit.

On a completely unrelated topic:  I read ding gnus from quimby.  What
do I need to do to add whatever header is necessary to keep folks from
emailing responses to the ding list and to me?  I feel at a loss -- I
don't know if I need "Mail-Followup-To: never" or what, let alone
where to fix gnus to automatically stick it in with each ding
message.

Jack.
-- 
Jack Twilley
jmt at twilley dot org
http colon slash slash www dot twilley dot org slash tilde jmt slash