Snarf PGP Keys from Signed Messages in Emacs mu4e

I just moved to mu for reading my email. One feature I was missing was the ability to receive PGP keys for signed messages.

When you receive a signed message, mu shows the verification status in the Signature field in the message view (see MSGV-Crypto). If you don't have the sender's PGP key on your keyring, this will show unverified. Click on the Details link within field will show the sender's key id. To manually import the key you can use gpg:

$ gpg --recv <the-key-id>

This seemed a little labourious, so some automation was in order. mu4e allows you to define actions that can be run on messages (or attachments), so I just wrote an action to do this.

(defun mu4e-view-snarf-pgp-key (&optional msg)
  "Snarf the pgp key for the specified message."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((msg (or msg (mu4e-message-at-point)))
          (path (mu4e-message-field msg :path))
          (cmd (format "%s verify --verbose %s"
                 mu4e-mu-binary
                 (shell-quote-argument path)))
          (output (shell-command-to-string cmd)))
    (let ((case-fold-search nil))
      (when (string-match "key:\\([A-F0-9]+\\)" output)
        (let* ((cmd (format "%s --recv %s"
                            epg-gpg-program (match-string 1 output)))
               (output (shell-command-to-string cmd)))
          (message output))))))

This works by parsing the output of the mu program itself, as displayed in the Details window, to obtain the PGP key id. It then executes the gpg --recv command, parsing in the parsed key id.

To install the action, we simply add it to mu4e-view-actions:

(add-to-list 'mu4e-view-actions
             '("Snarf PGP keys" . mu4e-view-snarf-pgp-key) t)

Discuss this post here.

Published: 2013-08-25

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