From: Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 94 10:43:10 PDT
To: khijol!erc@uunet.uu.net
Subject: Re:  totally secure email?
Message-ID: <199406181742.NAA28347@cs.oberlin.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> For political reasons, my email must be encrypted as soon as it hits
> the site before it gets dropped in my mailbox, or the sysadmi n will
> read it (snoopy bugger) and find out I'm looking for a job elsewhere.

Get teh unix program "procmail", source available on any comp.sources.misc archive, 
or, probably, at ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de /pub/unix/procmail.tar.Z.
 
This program lets you do things like sort your mail into different mailboxes
as soon as it comes in. It's also really easy to use it as a hook for
other programs or shell scripts to operate on mail as soon as it comes
in. It shouldn't be very hard to do what you want, but there are a couple
of things to be aware of here:
1) Your sysadmin can assuredly get around this too if he wants, and get
at your mail even before procmail does. As a general rule of thumb, the
sysadmin can do anything. But getting aroudn this would definitely be more
dificult then simply reading your /spool/mail file. 
2) You obviously don't want to leave your private key in your unix
account, as the sysadmin could just use it to decrypt all your mail
and read it. Obvious of course, but sometimes it's easy to overlook the
obvious.
 
Of course the best solution would be to have your correspondents send you
PGP encrypted mail, but I guess the best solution isn't always available.