[Mailman-Developers] Re: [Mailman-Announce] RELEASED Mailman 2.1 beta5

[Phil Stracchino]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 01:45:42AM +0100, Danny Terweij wrote:
> From: "Phil Stracchino" <alaric@babcom.com>
> 
> > So, my idea: GPG support for mailman, which the server operator has a
> > configuration option to disable, and allow registered listmembers to
> > upload a GPG public key.  This key could be used in either or both of
> > two ways:
> 
> I have only windows users on the lists. And this users are not familar with
> such things.
> Most of the members here are housewifes (woman who are not working and some
> do babysitting and take care of the husbands :) )

So the people who aren't familiar with it don't have to use it ...  and
it should be up to their server administrator whether to enable (and
hence expose) the feature in any case.  Admins running a large number of
lists with many subscribers on a heavily-loaded machine may not wish to
accept the additional CPU load.  (This is *why* I said the server
operator/admin should have the option to disable it server-wide.)

As for Windows ...  GPG is, as far as I know, still interoperable with
PGP, which is still available for Windows.  Further, a Windows program
called WinPT exists which integrates GnuPG into the Windows desktop, and
GPG plugins exist for both Eudora, Outlook Express, and Mozilla.  Then
there's GPGrelay which can be used to enable *any* Windows MUA to send
and receive GPG-signed and encrypted mail.

In short, being a Windows user does not mean that you cannot use GPG.  I
would also note that being a Windows user does not of itself mean that
you are inherently too ignorant to use GPG either.  Many people who
might use this feature if it was available have to use Windows because
that's all that their work provides, or because the software they want
to use most only runs on Windows.  To some extent, the Windows users are
possibly among those who need such capabilities most, because of
Windows' (particularly consumer Win9x's) crappy security.



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