[VM] OpenPGP best practice

[stefan . grosshauser]

Hello everybody,

I wonder how other users do email encryption and signing (and
decryption and verification) in vm and I would like to invite you to
share snippets, good links and experience so that they can be found by
others, e.g. in the mailinglist archive.

Maybe all that this is less a matter of vm but more of the mail-mode
and other modes, but I do not really know the interplay, so sorry if
this is in the wrong place.
 
I use GNU Emacs 24.3.50.1 (because this solves the difficulties
setting up SSL transport encryption), viewmail 8.2.0b, mailcrypt 3.5.9
and gpg as in the debian repos.  I was a little irritated when I
looked for an OpenPGP package, because mailcrypt looked pretty
abandoned on sourceforge (last modification in 2010 or 2011 or
so). But still it seems to me to do its job nevertheless - I do not know of
another more active package. If you do, please let us know.

My configuration is just copied from various places and is very basic:

    ;; Mailcrypt ====================================================
    (load-library "mailcrypt")
    (mc-setversion "gpg")

    (setq mc-pgp-user-id "address@hidden") ;; likely redundant
    (setq mc-gpg-user-id "address@hidden")

    (autoload 'mc-install-write-mode "mailcrypt" nil t)
    (autoload 'mc-install-read-mode "mailcrypt" nil t)

    (add-hook 'vm-mode-hook 'mc-install-read-mode)
    (add-hook 'vm-presentation-mode-hook 'mc-install-read-mode)
    (add-hook 'vm-summary-mode-hook 'mc-install-read-mode)
    (add-hook 'vm-virtual-mode-hook 'mc-install-read-mode)
    (add-hook 'vm-mail-mode-hook 'mc-install-write-mode)

    (add-hook 'vm-mail-send-hook '(lambda()
        (cond ((y-or-n-p "Sign the message? ")
            (mc-sign 1)))))

    (setq mc-passwd-timeout 600)
    ;; mc-gpg-file-mode =====================================
    (require 'mailcrypt)
    ;;(mc-setversion "gpg")
    (require 'mc-gpg-file-mode)


At the moment I only use mc-encrypt, mc-sign, mc-decrypt, mc-verify
and mc-snarf, that's it.

Having invoked mc-decrypt, I am asked wether I want to replace the
encrypted with the decrypted message. Somehow, I would like to leave
messages encrypted on the harddisk, but then I cannot respond with
quoted text or search the message body. If anyone knows how to get
around this, I would be interested to know.

What I would love to see is something like an
"auto-encrypt-mails-for-these-guys-alist" or even better a function that
checks wether the recipients key is in the keyring and then asks the
user y-or-n-p. (This sounds like a good elisp exercise for me,
actually)

cheers

Stefan


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