Your message dated Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:11:38 -0700
with message-id <4695089.Wku2Vz74k6@soren-desktop>
and subject line Re: Bug#416191: courier: Please package mimegpg as separate
package.
has caused the Debian Bug report #416191,
regarding courier: Please package mimegpg as separate package.
to be marked as done.
This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.
(NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this
message is talking about, this may indicate a serious mail system
misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact [email protected]
immediately.)
--
416191: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=416191
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact [email protected] with problems
--- Begin Message ---
Package: courier
Severity: wishlist
It would be very nice if I could install the mimegpg program without
pulling in tons of other courier stuff -- it is useful as a standalone
program.
Thanks.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.20-rc2-mm1-jbk1
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
On Wednesday, July 1, 2026 4:37:34 PM Mountain Standard Time Julian Blake
Kongslie wrote:
> It's been almost 20 years since I filed that wishlist report, so my
> memory of what I was doing is a bit hazy. Props to you for following
> up on such an old report, though!
>
> As I recall, I was just using mutt or something as an email client at
> the time and it didn't have good support for MIME-encoded PGP
> messages. The mimegpg program was extremely useful as a command line
> tool that I could use to filter messages and do the
> signing/encrypting/verifying/decrypting work. I wasn't using courier
> at all in this context, I was just calling mimegpg directly from mutt,
> which was looking at a mailbox that as I recall was synced from my ISP
> via offlineimap.
>
> I had a friend at the time who was also using mimegpg in a somewhat
> goofier non-courier-related context: they had an email server running
> exim which would accept pgp-encrypted messages, decrypt them server
> side using mimegpg, and store or forward them with the pre-decrypted
> content from there. I don't remember exactly /why/ they were doing
> this, but they got it working just fine.
>
> In any case, I'm not using that setup for my email anymore, so this
> doesn't really matter to me at this point. But mimegpg was (and, I
> assume, still is) a well-written filter that didn't really need any
> courier stuff to be useful, and it was sort of a shame that at the
> time in order to use it you had to pull in all the other courier
> stuff. It felt to me like courier shipped with a few very useful
> little utilities like that which deserved more attention than they
> got.
Thank you for the detailed explanation.
I am going to close this bug report, as I am unlikely to modify how mimegpg is
shipped unless I know that someone has a current need for it. However, if
anyone still needs this functionality, feel free to reopen the bug report.
--
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
--- End Message ---
