Eudora-GPG Scripts for MacOS X

I've written up some Applescripts for Eudora X to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify plain text messages using the MacOS X port of Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG). GnuPG is suppose to be compatible with PGP, so this replaces some of the functionality of the PGP plugin for classic Eudora. MacGPG does now provide Word Services which theoretically should be able to do all these things, but: 1) it does not handle the carriage return/linefeed issue and 2) does not paste altered messages back into a Eudora window automatically.

You are free to use these scripts as you like, but if you make any money off of them, give me some. Please note the Caveats and Limitations of these scripts.

These scripts are written mainly in AppleScript with a few one-liners sent to Unix via the 'do shell script' AppleScript command. The intention is to minimize the number items that have to be installed on the Unix side. The temptation is to do it all in Unix with say one large Perl script. However, this would make user interaction cumbersome as it would be difficult to pass messages between the user and the Perl script. As such, running time is only a secondary consideration in the design of these scripts.

Send comments and suggestions to "Richard Chang" <chang@comcast.net>.

Download Scripts

The current version is 0.008 (August 07, 2002). For a history of changes, consult the version history.

As compiled scripts in a StuffIt archive:

As plain text:

You will also need:

MacGPG: Consult MacGPG's site for installation instructions. You may want to import your PGP keys, if you have any. You will also have to choose a GPG passphrase. This might involve some use of the Terminal application.
system.osax scripting addition by Hideaki Imori: The easiest way to install this addition is to place it in Library/ScriptingAdditions of your home directory. You'll have to create the ScriptingAdditions directory if you don't already have one. Installing in /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions requires that you activate root login in NetInfo Manager and then login as root.
This addition is available from the author's site if you read Japanese (I don't).

Installing the Scripts

Take the programs, save them as compiled scripts using the Script Editor (or download the compiled scripts). Move the compiled scripts to the Eudora Scripts folder. The easiest way to do this is to select "Open Scripts Folder" in Eudora's "Script" menu. The Eudora-GPG-Lib file should be in a separate folder called "Eudora-GPG Stuff" in the Scripts folder. Eudora-GPG-Lib contains the common subroutines for the other scripts. Placing the file in a folder prevents Eudora from listing it as an executable script.
To sign, verify, decrypt or encrypt a message, open the Eudora message window with the text to be processed. The window must be the topmost or current window. Select the appropriate script from Eudora's Script menu. You have to supply your GPG passphrase to sign and decrypt messages.

Caveats and Limitations

The scripts have only been tested on a small number of systems: use at your own risk.
I see no good way of dealing with accented letters (e.g., å, é, ï, ò, ü). As far as I can figure out, Eudora uses the MacRoman encoding to store the characters internally. This get "transliterated" into another encoding (e.g., ISO-Latin-1) when sent. So, clearsigned messages either get munged and can't be verified or does not get munged and non-Mac users can't read the characters properly. We can only hope that some future version of Eudora uses a more standard encoding to store the messages.
Currently, the scripts depend on Eudora not forking off a process to run a script. Hence the user cannot change the current message while the script is running. If this ever changes in Eudora, you must not change the current message while the script is running. Otherwise, the resulting text will be pasted into the wrong message.
The scripts create some temporary files in your Temporary Items folder and removes them using the Unix "rm -P" command to overwrite and delete them. Hopefully, "rm -P" does enough overwriting to erase any sensitive information. In Version .005 and earlier the temporary files were placed in the user's Documents folder. It took some time to figure out the right incantations to make a new folder in the Temporary Items folder (mostly by searching Usenet News and trial-and-error). The advantage is that temporary files are supposed to go in the Temporary Items folder. The disadvantage is that if the script crashes or aborts prematurely, the folder will not be deleted until the next time the computer is rebooted (unless you do this manually in the Terminal application). Since Mac OS X is so stable, the files might be lying around for a while!
These scripts only deal with text in Eudora's current message window. In particular the encryption script does not deal with attachments. Also, styled text isn't supported and you should probably turn off "quoted printable" and "format=flowed". We won't enter a debate about "format=flowed".
When a message is decrypted, the entire body of the message is replaced with the decrypted text. If the original message included text outside the "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----" and the "-----END PGP MESSAGE-----" markers, this text gets clobbered. If this is undesirable, close the window and tell Eudora to discard the changes to the message when it asks if you would like to save.
Encrypt and Sign-Encrypt extract the first email address from the To: field of the message. It should be able to deal with multiple recipients and ask Eudora to create multiple messages, but that's too much hacking for now.

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Last Changed: August 7, 2002