Re: Entering passphrase twice when sending PGP signed message

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@xemacs.org> writes:

> [ Please keep the Cc to me if you want me to see the responses. ]
>
> I tried to gpg-sign a message I was sending.  Everything went fine,
> except for one detail: I was asked for passphrase twice, once (I
> think) before the mail was sent over the network, and once immediately
> afterwards.
>
> Since I have archiving turned on, I assume the problem is that the
> message is signed both when it is being sent and when it is being
> archived.  That sounds like a bug.  What do you think?

This happens if you use Gcc, and it is because the message is encoded
once for sendmail/SMTP/NNTP and once for the Gcc copy, as you assume.
But this can't be fixed easily, because the copy that is Gcc'ed is not
the same as the one that is mailed or posted.  An extreme example is
the `gnus-gcc-externalize-attachments', which make Gcc differ
distinctly from the SMTP/NTTP version of the mail.  The more subtle
examples are charset handling, news differ from mail, so making gcc
equal one of them still wouldn't solve the problem in general.

So unless someone has a clever idea how this could be solved, I think
we should consider it a feature.  There are alternative solutions,
e.g. Bcc, which would give you a exact copy of what is sent on the
(SMTP) wire.  Perhaps the g-g-e-a variable also save the MML PGP
headers directly.

Another approach would be to attack the source of the problem,
passphrases.  The gpg-agent seems like a good solution to that.