It was agreed that the group would look at each MUA in turn.
Unix-Elm: PA said that Imperial had been looking at 2.4.24pgp3. Sendmail worked fine, but there were problems with the elm code on Silicon Graphics machines when trying to received mail. AR said that there were two PGP implementations of elm. The other was the ME version developed under Solaris. He suggested that Imperial should look at this. JNB enquired which flavour was the most popular in the community. JNB will discuss this with Martin Hamilton. [Action:JNB]
Unix-Pine: JG that he had used the MK PGP csh script. It can be used to decrypt incoming messages and validate keys. It wasn't fully integrated into Pine. AR said that he had used this software and thought it worked quite well. However, he did not think it would be a good idea to put them in front of naive users - since it was not integrated well with the MUA, it looked quite different from the rest of Pine. MF agreed to produce a report on Pine [Action:MF]
MF asked what type of report was necessary. DM suggested that any information about experiences using the software would be most useful. MF then asked where the reports should be sent. DJ responded that they should be sent to the mailing list, mail-security@ukerna.ac.uk.
Unix-UCB: PCL had circulated a report.
Unix-PGP sendmail: MF said it would be difficult to integrate this into a site like Edinburgh. It does encryption for the user, but the option of decryption is disabled by default! PB said that it would encrypt ALL messages. MF said that most people would not want to use PGP for all mail. PB suggested that an extra header field requesting encryption would be useful.
Unix-ML mailer: JG said that this was an X-windows IMAP based client. It claims to have PGP integration built in. He has seen a demo, but it tends to crash on DecStation and Alpha machines.
Unix-eXmh: PB said that this was a fully integrated product with a tcl/tk front end to mh.
PC-Attismail: SH said that this should be taken off the review list. It was developed in the Netherlands and was very difficult to get working.
PC-Pegasus: AR said that the Mac version was not very good. The DOS version suffered from the lack of multi-tasking in DOS. The Windows version has basic encryption and signing features. The author of Pegasus has produced an API to allow PGP hooks, and another person has developed the PGP software. There are a few rough edges.
PC-Private Idaho: PO said that this was a difficult package to obtain and was rather DIY. It wasn't very well integrated and required a good number of key strokes to encrypt a message. PB suggested that this would be tolerable if a person only sends one/two PGP messages per week. He thought that he would send one secret and one authenticated message per week, but would receive more authenticated messages. AR said we shouldn't waste too much resource on such packages. JG suggested that we should add new MUAs to the Oxford archive as and when we get them to save the time of people trying to transfer them from abroad.
PC-PGP Clip: AR said that this was OK as clipboard tools go.
MF reported that Edinburgh UCS were not too interested in PGP - they say that students will not use it and staff mostly use commercial MUAs. DM suggested that information about MUAs should be in a easily to use form. PA said that Imperial were hoping to use PGP with a small number of users first then growing. RJH said that users will use PGP - we can't stop students using it.
PA said that there was a real problem with Microsoft Mailers, especially since new versions of Windows are shipping with these products. He said it was difficult to link these products with existing email infrastructures. Users will then demand secure email via these products. It is difficult talking to Microsoft. AR suggested we need to recommend general tools (e.g. clipboard utilities) for these products, but mention the other supported (public domain) MUAs at the same time.
JG asked if anyone had looked at ECSMail/Simeon or other IMAP based mailers. RJH said that Peter Whitehead at RPMS should be approached. PA reported that Simeon version 4 should be available in January 1996 for Windows, Mac and Solaris 2. There will no security hooks, but some authentication using Kerberos. Future development will be with PEM. ECSMail will become a public domain product.
DM enquired if a WWW service on MUAs an configurations would be made available. AR suggested that we also need further information on installing and configuring tools (possibly example .INI files for Windows).
Mac-Eudora: DJ said that PGP 2.62i worked using the clipboard anyway. There is a released version for Eudora with Applescript integration tools. However, these scripts do have some bugs - decoding works fine, but signing only works on small messages. It doesn't handle attachments.
VMS: JG suggested that it may be possible to port the scripts used with Pine to VMS. He was thinking about rewriting these scripts into PERL. AR suggested that a PGP interface with an external editor might be a better solution.
SH enquired if we were talking about text only body parts, or would the MUAs cope with any type of attachments. DJ said that a small number of MUAs can copy with attachments, but most don't. PB said that MIME would be the only solution to this problem.
[Break for lunch and demonstrations at 12.55pm]