Topal: GPG/GnuPG and Alpine/Pine integration: Distribution page

Copyright (C) 2001--2008 Phillip J. Brooke

Topal is a `glue' program that links GnuPG and Pine/Alpine. It offers facilities to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify emails. This is the feature list from the README file:

• In-place decryption/verification, dealing with multiple blocks embedded in text.
• Caching of output to reduce need for passphrase (at expense of storing decrypts and verification output).
• Receiving of MIME RFC2015/3156 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted messages. Top-level multipart items need some modification: see the README section `fixing multipart emails'. These features are available to any program that uses .mailcap files.
• Sending of MIME RFC2015/3156 multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted messages. (Needs a patch to Pine/Alpine.)
• Sending and receiving of the old application/pgp content-type (sending requires the same patch as the previous item).
• Offers user the opportunity to check output before sending it.
• Rich configuration options.
• Shortcuts for selecting keys, as well as general key selection routines when sending email.
• Few arbitrary limits.

See the README file for all the stuff like licensing, TO DO, recent changes, etc.

The current release of Topal is 57. Send email to pjb@lothlann.freeserve.co.uk if you would like to be notified of new Topal releases by email.

The most recent changes were:

2005-2007

Four internal development releases junked.

8/1/2008; release 55

--fix-email now replaces the original message with a multipart/misc wrapper, rather than expanding it into a multipart/alternative message.
Replaced some key selection code. Hopefully, this reduces the number of locale-dependent and GPG version-specific problems. Additionally, revoked, disabled and invalid keys are no longer offered; checks are made to ensure that the key is valid for encryption/signing when applicable.
New patch for Alpine 1.00. Includes configuration setting.
The `pass through unchanged' send option no longer modifies the content-type to text/plain.
Should now build and run on Cygwin.
Licence is now GPL-3.
Attempt to prevent potential memory leak (if running for a long time) by making the implementation of expanding_array a controlled type.
Cleaned up Ada source to reduce warnings.
Other minor changes, e.g., better checks on keylists, documentation clean-up.
Changed release numbering.
HTML cleaned up and CSS added.

8/1/2008; release 56

--read-from option added to select different signing keys depending on the From line. Also added sake and sxk configurations.
Fixed bug in Keys.Remove.Key (didn't match if the full fingerprint wasn't given).
Command-line parser now accepts 1 or more hyphens for any option.
Improved keylist documentation.
Corrected release date for release 55... oops.

8/1/2008; release 57

Initial attempt at supporting attachments within Topal.
Changed MIME boundary detection code (the previous algorithm couldn't cope with multipart included in a signed email). Please tell me if this breaks your emails....
Bug fix to _INCLUDEALLHDRS_ - it needs to turn the CRLF back into LF or it might chop off some of your message....

Files available are:

• The README file.
• GNU Public Licence version 3.
• The source code package (112 kB, release 57) and a detached signature.
  You will need the source package, even if you don't want to compile Topal yourself. The documentation is included in the tarball.
• The topal binary for Linux x86 (260 kB, not stripped, gzip'd, release 57) and a detached signature. The output of ldd for the topal binary (on the build machine) is

  	libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0x4002e000)
  	libreadline.so.4 => /lib/libreadline.so.4 (0x4006f000)
  	libgnat-4.1.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgnat-4.1.so.1 (0x4009b000)
  	libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x402f9000)
  	libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40304000)
  	libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x4041f000)
  	libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x40423000)
  	/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
  

• The topal binary for Linux x86 (statically linked against the GNAT library, 292 kB, stripped, gzip'd, release 57) and a detached signature. You'll need to rename this as `topal'. The output of ldd for this binary (on the build machine) is

  	libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0x4002e000)
  	libreadline.so.4 => /lib/libreadline.so.4 (0x4006f000)
  	libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x4009b000)
  	libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x400a7000)
  	libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x401c2000)
  	/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
  

• Some features (sending of any content-type except text/plain) require a patch to Pine. (See the README.)

Last generated: Tue Jan 8 18:59:53 GMT 2008