Recipe 8.7 Encrypted Mail with elm
8.7.1 Problem
You want to send and receive encrypted
email conveniently with the elm mailer.
8.7.2 Solution
While viewing an encrypted message, type:
| gpg --decrypt | less
to display the decrypted text page by page. To send an encrypted
message, encrypt it in your text editor. [Recipe 8.1][Recipe 8.2]
8.7.3 Discussion
We take advantage of elm's pipe
feature, which sends the body of a mail message to another Linux
command, in this case gpg. We further pipe it to a pager (we
chose less) for convenient display. For
encryption, we handle it in the text editor invoked by
elm to compose messages. [Recipe 8.1][Recipe 8.2]There are alternatives. A patched version of elm,
known as
ELMME+
, supports GnuPG directly. (The author,
Michael Elkins, went on to create mutt, [Recipe 8.6] which also supports GnuPG.)You might also try the pair of scripts
morepgp (for decrypting and
reading) and mailpgp (for
encrypting and sending), available at http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/elm/scripts/elm.pgp.scriptsl.
These scripts are for PGP, but modification for GnuPG should not be
difficult.
8.7.4 See Also
The elm home page is http://www.instinct.org/elm. Read more about
the scripts morepgp and mailpgp
at http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/elm/scripts/elm.pgp.scriptsl
and http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/elm/elm.indexl#security.