Mailing List Archive: Netscape plugin anyone?

Hi, I know that providing dumb-user readyness is is not one of GNU's
main concerns, but it woul promote PGP quite greatly, if one could
hack a little Netscape-plugin to use GnuPG. That way one could present
a real alternative to the free PKCS stuff that comes with Netscape.
I don't have any idea how to write Netscape plugins, but I wanted
to ask whether someone knows more about it, or is alreday working
on it?

Thanks,
-Gunther

--
Gunther Schadow -----------------------------------
http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu
Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
1001 W 10th Street RG5, Indianapolis IN 46202, Phone: (317) 630 7960
schadow@aurora.rg.iupui.edu ---------------------- #include
<usual/disclaimer>

Good luck; I would like to use your plug-in if you manage to get it
working. I looked into this a while ago and it seemed then that
Netscape plug-ins only support new MIME types. You couldn't (at that
time) use them to extend the mail reader.

An idea I once had was for a program that implements SMTP. You then
point your mail client at this program instead of your usual mail
server. On the first line of the mail message you put commands like:

Encrypt-To: Joe.Soap@blah

The SMTP program then acts on these commands before passing the message
on to the real mail server.

For inbound messages, the server decrypts them, checks signatures and so
on, and puts explanatory text at the start of the message to say what it
did. (Of course you would have to make sure that it was not possible
for senders to forge the explanatory text.)

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