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.scripts.html. 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.scripts.html and http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/elm/elm.index.html#security.