Re: How to decrypt an email save outside Moz ??

[Winston O'Brien]

Nelson B. Bolyard wrote:

Winston O'Brien wrote:

Nelson;
   I was hoping this wasn't the answer. This says that Moz is a closed
product that doesn't interact with other products even when using RFC
standard protocols and algorithms.

No, it says nothing of the sort.

I must apoligize ... in my frustration, I painted with too broad a brush. I was reacting to the PKI portion, rather than the product as a whole. My frustration stems from the design decision not to allow the user to decide if the local sent copy is encrypted or whether to decrypt when exporting the message.
Assuming a new email cert (new addresses) every 1-2 years; 1000 messages per year over 15 years. And access is only available through one product that may or may not be built for the system I am using. Scarry!

mozilla sends RFC 822 and MIME and SMIME complaint messages using SMTP and
receives them using POP3 or IMAP. Obviously, that IS interacting with other
products using RFC standard protocols.
Nearly every email client program has its own email folder file format.

I seem to be reading that the folder format is just old-fashioned 'mbox'. That is the answer when people ask about importing mail betweem Communicator and Moz. There are Perl modules to decompose those mbox folders into individual email then into SMIME components ..... then Blam, no tool to decrypt ... all is lost.

If you want the email client program to read a mail message that you've
stored in a local file, you have to put the message in a folder format for
the mail client to read it. That's true for BSD mail and System V mailx.
mozilla is certainly no exception to this rule.

You could also email the message to yourself as an attachment. As long as
the attachment has MIME content type message/rfc822, it should work. Using the file name extension .eml should suffice to achieve that.

I have started to try the certutil and cmsutil tools.

That is certainly doing it the hard way.
It's a 3 minute excersize with your favorite unix text editor tool (e.g.
vi or emacs) to put the file back into a folder and read it. You could

    If MOZ is runnable on this OS.....

write a small script to do this if you have many files to handle.

It's probably even faster than that to just remail the .eml message file to yourself as an attachment, if you only have one such file to handle.

--
Nelson Bolyard Disclaimer: I speak for myself, not for Netscape