Topal: GPG/GnuPG and Alpine/Pine integration

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).
Basic support for verifying S/MIME multipart/signed messages.
Offers user the opportunity to check output before sending it.
Remote sending and decryption for when reading email on a distant computer via ssh with secret keys on the local computer.
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 64. 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:

14/7/2008; release 61: An initial, rather crude, but (for my purposes at least) effective remote mode for sending.
Some history is now saved.
17/7/2008; release 62: Added basic support for S/MIME verification of messages.
Quoted-printable encoder (in MIME-tool) improved (single dots and leading "From ") as per RFC2049.
Decode quoted-printable and base64 before calling run-mailcap.
Ignore errors in strip in Makefile (trips up Cygwin, which expects the executable to be foo.exe).
Update feature list for remote sending.
Internal changes to configuration storage.
31/8/2008; release 63: Update change list for release 62 (omitted some items...).
Give a sensible warning message instead of dying with an exception when (1) signing operations are called without own key set; (2) attempting to choose own key without any secret keys available.
Added some hints in the documentation.
Initial attempt at supporting remote decryption.
Handle SIGINT ourselves so that temporary files are cleaned up. Also clean up more often when exceptions occur.
24/10/2008; release 64: Update feature list for release 63's remote decryption support.
Add patch to Topal sources for Cygwin. (The recent interrupt code doesn't build.)
Bug fix: temporary files weren't being deleted, because Rm_Tempfiles_PID hadn't been changed to match Temp_File_Name.
Added patch for Alpine 2.00. Alpine's S/MIME needs to be turned off for Topal's S/MIME verification to work.
Bug fix in Externals.Simple.Guess_Content_Type.

Files available are:

The README file.
GNU Public Licence version 3.
The source code package (172 kB, release 64) 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 (264 kB, not stripped, gzip'd, release 64) and a detached signature. The output of ldd for the topal binary (on the build machine) is

	linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
	libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0x4002f000)
	libreadline.so.4 => /lib/libreadline.so.4 (0x40070000)
	libgnarl-4.1.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgnarl-4.1.so.1 (0x4009d000)
	libgnat-4.1.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgnat-4.1.so.1 (0x400cb000)
	libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x40328000)
	libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x4033a000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x40345000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/libdl.so.2 (0x40477000)
	libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0x4047c000)
	/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

The topal binary for Linux x86 (statically linked against the GNAT library, 376 kB, stripped, gzip'd, release 64) and a detached signature. You'll need to rename this as `topal'. The output of ldd for this binary (on the build machine) is

	linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
	libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0x4002f000)
	libreadline.so.4 => /lib/libreadline.so.4 (0x40070000)
	libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x4009d000)
	libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x400af000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x400ba000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/libdl.so.2 (0x401ec000)
	/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: Fri Oct 24 11:17:03 BST 2008