Hi John Jack Doe!

Am 05.03.19 19:08 schrieb(en) [email protected]:
You won the bet. It's M$ Exchange. I owe you a beer or two.

😊️

I did some tests and sent a test message with an attachment and autokey via the 
M$ Exchange server to myself and to my other private email account. Both were 
received and decrypted without any problems.

Hmmm, ok.

I did some internet search and found no confirmation that M$ Exchange and/or 
Outlook can handle PGP/MIME iaw RFC 3156.

For Lookout, a plug-in is available (Gpg4Win, <https://www.gpg4win.de/>, the 
development has been sponsored by the German government, Federal Office for 
Information Security (BSI), btw.).  As always, such OL plug-ins may or may not work 
well, as M$ tends to change internal structures and api's without notice.  I.e. it 
might simply stop working after the next update.

However, I found some information that M$ Exchange is rewriting the content 
header and thus causing decryption trouble.

This has, at least in the past, been a problem – as exchange is basically a 
database frontend, IIRC it just re-wrote “unknown” headers to 
application/octet-stream.  I no *no* deep insight into Exchange, though, so I 
cannot tell if it's still an issue.

I also asked the IT specialist of the company I work for if M$ Exchange and/or 
Outlook can handle PGP/MIME iaw RFC 3156. He answered that M$ Exchange doesn't 
care about the content and Out is downloading everything that is offered. For 
M$ Exchange he might be right.

I'm not absolutely sure…  I remember a case (~1 year ago) where the signatures 
of messages created by a (defective) python lib were broken: the python lib 
erroneously added “MIME-Version: 1.0” to /every/ part, not only to the 
top-level headers.  Exchange apparently stripped them in the database, 
re-assembled the message without them, which of course broke the signature…  
However, at least /decrypting/ messages should work just fine.

See the headers from my testing below. With Outlook I'm not sure because I 
received an message that was retrieved with Outlook and resent to myself. And 
in this message the header was rewritten and the pgp part was base 64 encoded. 
I will do some more testing.

Here are parts of the header of the email sent with Balsa to the M$ Exchange 
server:

Running all three snippets through a three-way diff shows that they are 
identical, with the exception of the extra “X-*” top-level headers which are 
absolutely legal and should /not/ hamper decryption in any way.  Which of these 
messages does Balsa decrypt, and which not?  Which one has been received from 
the IMAP server?

I also double-checked with the current git master that GnuPG decryption of 
multipart/encrypted *does* work just fine for messages loaded from IMAP – with 
dovecot at work, and with two different ISP's (vodafone/arcor and netcologne; 
not sure which IMAP server they use, though).

It /might/ be helpful to run Balsa with GpgME debugging, as it /might/ give more 
error information when the decryption process failed which is not passed through 
gpgme (see <https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gpgme/Debugging.html>):

* terminate balsa;
* run (from the shell) “GPGME_DEBUG=9:/your/home/balsa-gpgme.log /path/to/balsa”
* open *one* message where decryption fails, then terminate Balsa
* check balsa-gpgme.log

Cheers,
Albrecht.

Attachment: pgpvtRMkeaaWt.pgp
Description: PGP signature

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