Subject: Password-Protected folders

From: [email-masked]
Date: 3 Dec 1994 21:51:59 GMT

I use Pine to read my mail.  I would like to have a mail reader with 
password-protected folders.  That way, several people can share an 
account, yet their mail can be automatically sorted into folders (I know 
how to do this), and still be private mail.  Our school has such an 
account that allows it to be shared.  

How can I do password-protected folders? 

Thanks,

kevin

-- 
Kevin

Virtual:  [email-masked] <Kevin Jeffrey Sinclair>
Physical: San Carlos, CA USA <south of San Francisco>

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From: [email-masked] (Jim Davis)
Date: 3 Dec 1994 15:59:43 -0700

In article <[email-masked]>,  <[email-masked]> wrote:
:I use Pine to read my mail.  I would like to have a mail reader with 
:password-protected folders.  That way, several people can share an 
:account, yet their mail can be automatically sorted into folders (I know 
:how to do this), and still be private mail.  Our school has such an 
:account that allows it to be shared.  

Yow.  Shared accounts and private email go together like jogging and
nitroglycerin.  (The security implications of shared accounts are
usually explosive, too.)

:
:How can I do password-protected folders? 

In Pine, I guess you could try hacking folder password protection into
the source code.  Since UNIX doesn't have the concept of
password-protected files you'd have a bit of work to do.  But how
would you keep the account sharers from bypassing the password inside
Pine simply by reading the disk file?  You've lost all the usefulness
of UNIX file protections by sharing the account!

Outside of Pine, if you're using something like deliver or procmail to
send mail to separate folders (how do you distinguish what goes in
which folder?) then you could try encrypting the message with a
per-folder key when you write it out to the folder.  Then to read it
inside Pine, hack in a decryption thing that prompts for the key.
(While you're at it, make it a general folder-processing module so
that you could substitute uncompressing for decryption.)

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: 4 Dec 1994 16:24:01 GMT

: In Pine, I guess you could try hacking folder password protection into
: the source code.  Since UNIX doesn't have the concept of
: password-protected files you'd have a bit of work to do.  But how
: would you keep the account sharers from bypassing the password inside
: Pine simply by reading the disk file?  You've lost all the usefulness
: of UNIX file protections by sharing the account!

The account is a school account.  Teachers and students use the same 
account, all off of 1 machine.  They use only Pine and IRC.  They are 
unlikely to do much else, although in the future they will do gopher and 
we will have an IP account to do WEB stuff.  They don't access the files 
directly, and are unlikely to become unix experts in any way.  They just 
want to send and receive email.  I want to give at least the 'appearance' 
of protected folders.  It does not have to be a perfect solution.

I am not a unix programmer.  But what might work is this: a menu, like this:

				Choose Option
				-------------

			1. IRC
			2. Email

And if they choose #2, they get asked their mailname and password; and 
then I put them right into their own folder in Pine.  In the script 
making up the menu, I can move the folders in and out of the ~/mail 
directory, so that in the folder list screen of Pine they see only the 
inbox, sent-mail, and their own folder.  

I don't know how to make a script that could do this menu, and I don't 
know how to store the passwords and the usernames somewhere.  There must 
be other people who have done menu's on unix.  Can someone help me?

Thanks,

kevin

[email-masked]
-- 
Kevin