I think you completely misunderstood me. I meant use the cue cat program to encrypt the message. Sure it's lame and not strong for important stuff, but it would be different. It would be neat to have a plug-in for Kmail or Netscape mail that would do this. Here's an idea. A group of people have a set of bar codes as the keys to all their encryption. You run the message through the encoding perl script and then scan a barcode to encrypt. Am I off-base here? The barcode could initiate encryption in any algorithm it is tied to in the second "encryption" script. Then again, maybe I just had too much OJ this morning and it is adversely affecting my cold-ridden brain. Brian Severely over thinking things this morning.