I\'m currently in a position where there are two of us, and neither of us should

Question

I'm currently in a position where there are two of us, and neither of us should be able to send an email from a joint account without the explicit approval of both of us. Ideally, I'm looking for software which will basically allow either of us to compose an email, and then hold it until both of us have clicked a "Send" button. The obvious generic extension of this which has a slightly likelier chance of existing would require m approvals from a total of n people.

In particular, we are looking for an automated solution to ensure that neither of us accidentally thinks that the other has given implicit approval (say verbally) when in fact that hasn't happened. The attack vector of one of us forging an SMTP header is not one that we are trying to defeat.

Explanation / Answer

My first thought is to have a python server task running that allows either/any you to compose an email, GPG signs it and displays it for the other(s) to approve & possibly edit - editing should invalidate any GPG signatures - and it sends when the required number of valid signatures are reached. Python includes an SMTP module in the standard libraries and a GPG wrapper is available for the signing/checking functionality.

This should be reasonably easy to implement and you have a wide choice of user interface libraries. Definitely cross platform and free as GPG and python are both FOSS and available for a wide range of platforms.

Of course you could just tailor your signatures to read something like "This email only acts as permission to proceed if it has been GPG signed by both...." and use a standard GPG email plugin

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