Integrating GPG with Popular E-Mail Clients

Elm

Elm supports PGP "out of the box." Enabling GPG takes only a little bit of work. One very short path to support is to use a shell program that "wraps" GPG with commands that look and work like the old PGP 2.6.2 commands. This is a solution for full compatibility with a lot of old PGP supporting applications.

This compatibility package is called pgpgpg. Here's some info :

Package: pgpgpg

Homepage: http://www.nessie.de/mroth/pgpgpg

Download: ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/pub/gcrypt/pgpgpg-0.13.1.tar.gz

Once you have this installed, you can use the older PGP commands (which is what elm will do!) to enable PGP support.

Mutt

As of this writing, the most current version of mutt is 1.2.5i. Mutt has optional support for PGP at compilation. As with elm, you can get mutt working by using pgpgpg.

Even without direct support, you can use the "F" (filter) command to send your message attachment through GPG for signature and/or encryption. You can use the pipe (|) command on the receiving side to send your message through GPG for decryption and signature verification.

Pine

Here again someone has done all the work for us. There is a program called gpg4pine. Here's some info:

Package: gpg4pine

Homepage: None (alas!)

Download: http://azzie. robotics .net/

Complete directions are included with the software. (Try this too!)

Kmail

The newest versions of Kmail support GP6 directly, but older versions can support it through a PGP compatibility wrapper. Once you have installed gpgpgp, you open File/Settings, and select the PGP tab, as shown in Figure 10-1 .

Figure 10-1. Kmail PGP Settings tab.

Mailx and Mail

These mail clients are so basic and primitive that not even I use them. As it happens, it is simple, if inconvenient, to use GPG with these programs. You must sign or encrypt your mail as a text file outside the program and then redirect the file in to send it. To read such mail, you must save the message to a file (using the save or copy commands), and then run GPG on the file directly.

Netscape

Netscape does not support GPG decently. You must "presign" and/or "pre-encrypt" your messages; you must save your messages to files to check signatures and decrypt. Sad, isn't it?