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Adding PGP support to mozilla
Seth Spitzer
sspitzer@mozilla.org
2/15/2002

S/MIME support was recently added to mozilla.  
If you are interested in adding PGP support, start by looking at how 
we added S/MIME support.

1) account manager UI:  mozilla/mailnews/extensions/smime
2) backend code, hooks into the cert db, etc:  mozilla/mailnews/extensions/smime
3) compose window overlays:  mozilla/mailnews/extensions/smime
4) msg header view overlays:  mozilla/mailnews/extensions/smime
5) The compose UI is done using overlays and XPCOM tricks.  
6) The only hacked in part was to the mime back end. 

We (the mailnews modules owners) would be receptive to similar changes 
to PGP extension and similar hard coded hacks to mime for PGP.

see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74157, and the bugs it 
depends on for additional information about the S/MIME extension.

I don't know how http://enigmail.mozdev.org works, so I can't comment on it.

I do know how the NAI PGP plugin works, and it was not done right, which is
why it was rejected.

For some out of date discussions on that, see 
http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/compose_send_plugin_arch_notes.html and 
http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/mozmail-5-23-log.html.  

For a lengthy discussion, see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22687