Re: Canonical methods for digitally signing and verifying

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

Simon Josefsson <sj@extundo.com> writes:

> Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com> writes:
> 
> > Assuming that my Spanish friend is using an email agent such as
> > Outlook or Netscape to read my letters, and assuming that she does
> > nothing to decode or verify my signature, is it likely that those two
> > email clients do the right thing with the quoted printable text that
> > I'm sending via gnus within my digitally signed message, and that the
> > characters will be converted back into the 8bit Spanish characters
> > when my friend is reading her email?
> 
> Yes.

Thanks.  Not using either of those two programs for email, it would
have been hard for me to verify this myself.  Therefore, your answer
was quite helpful.

And congratulations for deciphering and understanding my long,
run-on sentence!  :)


> > I'd like to start digitally signing ALL my outgoing messages
> 
> Signing posts to public mailing lists is not generally useful, IMHO.
> (Mostly because of all programs out there with poor MIME support, not
> to mention PGP/MIME or S/MIME.)  Some ML managers will even destroy
> your signature to make it even more of a hassle.

Well, I was thinking of configuring gnus to always sign my outgoing
emails, but I guess that isn't a good idea.  I suppose that I'll have
to put something into my gnus setup to make the decision on a
group-by-group basis as to whether a message gets signed or not.

It doesn't appear that `gnus-posting-styles' can help me with this,
right?

Therefore, here's my idea as to how to do this: I'll use
`gnus-message-mode-hook' to set a buffer-specific variable based on
the group name.  This variable will be a flag which is set to `t' if I
want to sign my messages by default.  Then, since I already have a
wrapper around `message-send-and-exit', in this wrapper I'll look at
this buffer-specific flag to determine whether I sign the message or
not.

How does this idea sound?  Has anyone come up with other, more
elegant ways to do this sort of thing?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com