Dear Maintainer,

Currently using mutt on a mailbox which contains OpenPGP-encrypted e-mails is a bit of a hassle, especially when I want to search through them. I run a research on e-mail bodies from the index section, which takes some time, so I let it run in the background and come back a few minutes later, only to find out that it reached an encrypted e-mail at some point and prompted me for the GPG key passphrase, blocking the interface until I give it. Depending on the size of the mail archive it can be a significant waste of time.

When I have several encrypted e-mails, encrypted with different keys, and some using expired keys, that's even more annoying.

OpenPGP is meant to secure messages over the various network links and intermediate servers between the sender's MUA and the recipient's MUA. Securing e-mails on the recipient's local computer isn't OpenPGP's job : this is done via file permissions and/or folder / disk encryption.

See this demand concerning an other MUA : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=280588

I think mutt should provide the possibility to locally store unencrypted copies of e-mails which are encrypted on the distant IMAP server, without uploading those back to the IMAP server of course. This way the user could search through all messages and treat them like clear text, without having to deal with prompts that could induce delays and errors. The message_cachedir would probably be the proper place for that.

So two complementary proposals :

  1. allow to use message_cachedir under any condition ( not just when using an imap(s):// folder, but also when using a local ~/Mail folder );

  2. give an option to store message bodies in a clear-text form in the message_cachedir folder once they've been decrypted. I propose to have it as an option so the extra-paranoid could keep those mail bodies encrypted ;

Regards,