[Nmh-workers] E flag in scan output & the wayback machine

[Ken Hornstein]

I've always wondered about the E flag in the output of "scan"; for
those of you unaware, it shows if a message is encrypted or not.
Well, that's the theory at least ... the implementation is that
it's looking for a "encrypted" component (I suspect it was a
pseudo-component).  I always wondered about it because I never saw
any support for encrypted email in MH/nmh except for kinda-hacky add-ons.

I happened to be digging in the OLD mh-users archives (MMDF format!) for
something else and I found a message from Marshall Rose sent on April 14th,
1986, talking about what this was.  It turned out there was actually
a bunch of code to do "trusted mail" in MH.  The code was never licensed
for public domain AFAIK (Marshall said in the email that negotiations were
underway for "wider distribution"; I guess that never happened).  A
paper was written about it, you can get it here:

        http://ftp.vim.org/pub/mail/mh/doc/trusted.ps.gz

Perhaps the old geezers on this list already knew about this; it was news
to me and I thought others would be interested.

--Ken