Topal: GPG/GnuPG and Alpine integration

Copyright © 2001–2024 Phillip J. Brooke

Topal is a “glue” program that links GnuPG and Alpine (a rewrite of the University of Washington's Pine email client, currently maintained by Eduardo Chappa). It offers facilities to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify emails.

Features

• Multiple inline PGP blocks can be processed in display filters.
• Decryption and verification output can be cached to reduce the number of times a passphrase is entered. This also helps when secret keys aren't always available, at the expense of storing decrypted output.
• MIME/OpenPGP (RFC2015/RFC3156) multipart messages can be sent and received. Depending on configuration, this might involve procmail, using sendmail-path or patching Alpine.
• The deprecated application/pgp content-type can be sent and received.
• S/MIME messages can be sent and received if gpgsm is available. (openssl is also used in some circumstances, but gpgsm is still required.)
• Topal can be used as Alpine's sendmail-path command.
• Topal has a remote sending mode (a server and a means of accessing the server) for reading email on a distant computer via SSH with secret keys on the local computer.
• A range of mechanisms for selecting keys for both self and recipients.
• There is a high level of configurability (although the configuration interface does not expose all of it; you might have to edit .topal/config).

Documentation

See the included documentation for all the stuff like licensing (Topal is released under the GNU Public Licence version 3), recent changes and instructions.

A recent manual (PDF).

Releases/downloads