Subject: Re: bug#13551: acknowledged by developer (control message for bug #13551)

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2019 09:18:38 -0400

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Emacs cannot possibly know that when you send to "arthur", that that
  > email will eventually end up going to "[email-masked]".

Sure it can.  It could get the domain from mail-host-address.  We
could also create another variable specifically to control this.

The current behavior, as you described it, is not much better
security.  It is unpredictable in practice for the user.  However,
I am not sure how much security issue there is in sending A a message
encrypted for B.  Nobody can decrypt that message.

I have seen reason to think that the current behavior doesn't match
what you described.  I entered "To: rms" and encrypted the message.
It recognized that was me, [email-masked], and encrypted with my key.

It did this even though my key does not list 'rms' with no host name as
an address (as far as I can tell).

gpg --edit-key [email-masked] gave me this:

    pub  4096R/2C6464AF2A8E4C02  created: 2013-07-20  expires: never       usage: SC  
	 ...
    sub ...

    [ultimate] (1). Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>

If the key had another address, wouldn't it be listed there?

In addition, after I run the encryption command,
plain 'rms' has been edited into [email-masked]'.  How does it know
to make that change?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)