Previous Next Table of Contents

1. Introduction to premail

This is the documentation for version 0.44 of premail, an e-mail privacy package by Raph Levien.

The main function of premail is adding support for encrypted e-mail to your mailer, using plain PGP, PGP/MIME, MOSS, or S/MIME.

In addition, premail provides a seamless, transparent interface to the anonymous remailers, including full support for Mixmaster remailers and the nymservers. Nymservers provide cryptographically protected, fully anonymous accounts for both sending and receiving e-mail.

While premail can be used as a stand-alone application, it works best when integrated with your mailer. Currently, premail is integrated completely seamlessly and transparently only with Netscape 3.0's built-in mailer. It works fairly well with Pine 3.94 or later, as well (plain PGP is supported, but decryption of MIME-based e-mail encryption protocols is still missing). Transparent integration of outgoing mail only is supported for any mailer in which the mail sending program can be configured, including Berkeley mail, most emacs mailers, and MH. For these mailers, you can decode messages with a single command.

To integrate with your mailer, premail places itself between the mailer and the actual mail transport. For outgoing mail, premail masquerades as sendmail. You configure your mailer to call premail instead of sendmail. Then, premail performs the encryption or signing, and invokes sendmail to actually send the message.

For mailers that call a command to receive incoming mail (including Netscape 3.0), the situation is similar. Netscape, for example, can be configured to call movemail to get incoming mail. To integrate premail, you'd configure Netscape to call premail instead, which would in turn call movemail to actually get the mail, then would decode it.

You need the following software in order to effectively use premail:


Previous Next Table of Contents