CryptoMail Newsletter

CryptoMail.org publishes the CryptoMail News-letter to provide information about secure web based email communication.

New CryptoMail Email System Release

People in CryptoMail.org are very excited to announce that the new CryptoMail Email System 0.99 has been released last month.  This newly released version, jumping from 0.90b to 0.99, would enhance user experiences and improve system administration.

The main improvement of this new release contains new installation and configuration scripts which allow system administrators to use answer and question based installation.  Now, you will install the email system by typing "/configure.sh."

Receiving feedback from users, developers and system administrators, our chief developer designed to change some parts of the protocol.  Now, the server tells the client via SSL what the session key is, so the steps 1-22 of the Secure Session Initialization in the CryptoMail SeXMAP Specification can be eliminated.  Basically, the client submits the form with the user name, and then the result is a page served with HTTPS with an applet that has the session key in it.  This caused the database schema to change, and the elimination of pooling asymmetric keys.  As the result, CMKEYPOOL and supporting objects will no longer be needed in the system, and they are went away. The new changes also made the protocol more secure.

With the enchantments and changes in the new release, the documentation in the source code also has been updated.  Our chief developer modified the README.txt and other documents in the distribution to reflect what is going on in the new version.

Since the last release of the CryptoMail Email System, the GPG library has updated.  To gain improvement from the new library, the new release, the 0.99 CryptoMail Email System uses and requires GPG 1.04 for its cipher library.  We also include the source code of the GPG 1.04 in the source distribution of the CryptoMail Email System.

The new release of the CryptoMail Email System also contains many major bug fixes.  The most critical fix is the Java client and bin server now can handle international characters.  In previous release, if users attempted to send an email message with international characters in the subject line or the message body, the client will crash.  There was a problem when trying to view messages from different character sets.  When given to the user in the XML header fields un-escaped, it cased the problems.  Now, all header information is escaped so it can be true XML.

In the final note of this new release, our chief developer, Joshua Teitelbaum jumped from 0.90b to 0.99 because of the significant protocol, database and client changes.  After many internal releases and testing, all people in CryptoMail.org agree with Joshua that a new public release is needed, since the significant improvement from last release should encourage people to upgrade to this more secure and stable version of the CryptoMail Email System.

Free Software Foundation’s Party

In San Francisco’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2002, Free Software Foundation hosted a party in the second day of the exposition and invited everyone.  Peter and Joshua were there.  We met some new people and ran into some old friends.

Users Q&A

Q: For CryptoMail Email Service, how many minutes of idle would my email season be dropped?

A: After idle for 30 minutes of an inactive email session, the server will close the session and you will need to login again.  By definition, an inactive email session is a successfully login session with the main client window appear in your web browser that continually without any communication between the client and server.

Future Events

In the coming month, you will experience some changes in our website.  Our webmaster will place new information to reflect changes and on-going businesses.  If you intend to bookmark any pages of our website, you might want to reload the pages in this coming month.

CryptoMail Newsletter is published 3 times in a year by our members.  Submissions are welcome, and you can send your submissions to our editorial director 2 weeks before our deadline for the preceding publication.

Editorial Director: Peter Leung (pleung@cryptomail.org)

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