#{Unspecific}

Back when Gnus used to call mailcrypt to decrypt GPG encrypted messages, it was easy to save a plaintext copy of the message for the purpose of archiving. It seems that this feature disappeared with the change-over to PGG. Quite annoying. Well, PGG makes reading PGP/MIME mails easier, however an archive containing encrypted message is almost useless. No way to search for messages.

Fortunately, I found a very easy method to decrypt all messages in a mbox archive or IMAP folder using mutt. I put this in my ~/.muttrc:

set fcc_clear = yes
bind pager @ decrypt-save
bind index @ decrypt-save

This binds the decrypt-save function to the @ key. Thus, it becomes easy to apply this function to all encrypted messages. Open a mail folder, press T to select messages by a pattern. ~G is the pattern that selects all encrypted messages; pressing ; ends the tagging process and waits for the key that denotes the operation to be applied to the selection. That would be @ in this case. Decrypting the 1500 encrypted messages I considered for archiving took about 20 minutes. Great!

I wish I knew how I could have achieved this with Gnus. However, I’m to busy to find out or even hack some Gnus code. In my experience hacking Gnus always takes thirty times longer than expected. And I really should make some progress on the paper I’m planning to present at the IFL.

Technorati Tags: Gnus, mutt, GnuPG, IMAP

The combination of OS X, X11, and XEmacs is driving me mad. I don’t know how many times I have fiddled with xmodmap to set up the keyboard for my needs. I was perfectly happy with the xmodmap configuration I found on a Mac and ion user’s home page (Can’t find the link anymore).

And along came Tiger and ate the Alt-key. For some unknown esoteric reason the Alt-key stopped working. Only Steve knows. This thread on one of Apple’s mailing lists was very helpful for solving the problem.

Technorati Tags: OS X, XEmacs, keyboard