I am working on a project which requires that I send and receive email
containing data from my company's data bases. The data must be sent (and
received) as an encrypted attachment to a MIME compliant email utilizing a
Digital Certificate purchased from a government (state of California)
approved source.  (Each outgoing email will cause the recipient to send a
return encrypted email, acknowledging receipt and notifying of any errors in
the received data - this must be processed by a program on the HP3000 as it
will not be in a form understandable by a user).  And this project applies
to multiple separate companies that are customers of my company - each
company will have to send and receive this data by email; or we will have to
do it on their behalf.

I am basically a Cobol programmer familiar with MPE/iX and things like IMAGE
and KSAM and command interpreter language programming. I have zero network
knowledge, zero email knowledge, zero encryption knowledge, zero Unix
knowledge, and extremely limited C language knowledge. And I probably do not
have time for a complete re-education.  (It goes without saying that no one
in my company has any more knowledge on these subjects than I do).

I have considered two possible approaches (but would be glad to know of
others); one: create an MPE flat file of data, have users download to their
PC, initiate email, attach PC file of data, encrypt, and send (and be able
to reverse the process for the incoming email responses), or two: get some
kind of email system for the HP3000 (and any necessary accompanying
software) to which I could pass the raw data and instruct the software to
encrypt, sign and send (or the reverse for incomming email).

Option one is probably doable with no outside help, but I prefer the second
option because I am not comfortable with the idea of expecting individual,
non-computer savvy, users to accomplish this job reliably.  But so far,
although I am aware of some product(s) which might fill the bill on the
HP3000, what I have seen appears to require me to get very Unix (POSIX)
savvy (not to mention getting HP3000 network savvy, and encryption savvy)
and I am not sure that will be possible. Perhaps I have over-estimated the
difficulty, but this is just one project - it is not likely that my job will
call for me to make use of this additional knowledge for any other projects,
making it hard to justify the effort.  I would love to find some software
that I could just intall and start using without having to do any more than
learn how to tell it to do what I want.  (What I have looked at so far is
"Sendmail/iX" and "OpenSSL MPE/iX" - I have just reviewed some documentation
on them, I have not attempted to install or test).

Does anyone have any suggestions?  Is this easier than I think?  My company
is very small and does not have much money to spend, but considers this an
important project, so I believe they would be willing to put some investment
into it.