We were discussing on IRC whether decryption should be handled in notmuch show --decrypt or in emacs and I had a quick look at what it would take for emacs. Here is a snippet of code that outputs "Good signature from 5585F58CC827A062 Sebastian Spaeth (Private Communication) <Sebastian@SSpaeth.de> (trust ultimate) created at 2010-04-26T14:27:07+0200 using DSA" in the minibuffer. I guess something based on this could be used to parse the email and try to decrypt via gpg and mark the signature status in the summary line: (save-excursion (let ((context (epg-make-context)) (signature "-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkvVhpsACgkQVYX1jMgnoGJx4wCfXYKGdlc6HixqGwvWL4E+9t+M QusAnA97NGdSLBFH6LeS3F8x3tAMd8td =2nbO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----") (signed-text " teste ")) (epg-verify-string context signature signed-text) (let ((result (epg-context-result context))) (message (epg-verify-result-to-string (cdr (car result)))) )))