Re: EasyPG for signing and en/decrypting Email

[Richard Riley]

Daiki Ueno <ueno@unixuser.org> writes:

>>>>>> In <87prfr2unh.fsf@sunoano.org> 
>>>>>>  Suno Ano <suno.ano@sunoano.org> wrote:
>> Due to the lack of documentation on the matter I am trying to
>> summarize/clarify a few things and when done, put it onto
>> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EasyPG so others will have an easier path
>> to gettings things done with regards to signing and en/decrypting
>> emails.
>
> I'd appreciate someone could do that (though I don't like EmacsWiki).
>
> Anyway, I'd suggest that you should know at least the overall concept
> i.e. what is PGP/MIME, what is OpenPGP, and how Gnus handles them.
>
> - PGP/MIME is a standard, which mml2015* implements using ep[ag]-*.
>
> - OpenPGP is a standard, which ep[ag]-* implements.
>
> Please note that PGP/MIME is a higher level concept of OpenPGP.
>
> Also, you should know that "inline PGP" (which epa-mail-* implements) is
> a different format from PGP/MIME:
> http://josefsson.org/inline-openpgp-considered-harmful.html
>
>> The other day we had another thread which contained this message of
>> Thierry
>
>>  Thierry> if you call `epa-mail-sign' with a prefix arg, you will have
>>  Thierry> an interface to choose your key.
>
> This is not appropriate if you use PGP/MIME because epa-mail-* commands
> are for "inline PGP".
>
> Regards,

This was a confusion to me too because it seemed epa is a wrapper to all
things pgp. At the very least maybe the pgp/mime docs in gnus need
marking to show egp is now standard too : currently there are no
meaningful comments about epg in the gnus manual (emacs snapshot in debian).