I have two feature requests for the smime package included in gnus shipped with emacs. The first is trivial and simply adds the AES encryption standard to that which is supported by emacs smime (openssl supports these, if there are many versions which don't perhaps adding a note the the doc string to check before changing would be appropriate in addition to the change). This change is implemented in the first attached patch. The second is somewhat less trivial, some folks will have there RSA private key not encrypted for whatever reason and it can be fairly annoying to have to enter a password for such keys each time (and in cases where it would not be appropriate to change the password cache time, one would have to). Since I found no real easy way to determine if a key is encrypted other than to open the file and check every time, I added another bit to the smime-keys variable allowing the user to specify if that key is clear or not, and added optional args to the signing and decryption functions along with a helper function that will determine if the key (by email) needs a password or not. This is implemented in the second attached patch. Thanks, -Arik