on Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 02:14:12PM -0600, John Galt ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Jul 2001, Martin F. Krafft wrote:
>
> >also sprach Adam Bell (on Wed, 25 Jul 2001 04:04:35PM -0400):
> >> Okay, so can anyone tell me what popular (to Debian Users) MUA
> >> sends every single message as an attachment to an empty message?
> >
> > as others have said, it's micro$oft's inability to stick to standards
> > --- PGP/GPG nowadays uses MIME for signed and encrypted messages,
> > which mickysoft can't handle...
>
> I'm not too happy with some of the factual errors here.
>
> 1) PGP/GPG doesn't use anything: {p|g,g|p,p|g} is perfectly happy
> encrypting anything you throw at it: it's a command line utility, designed
> for use with STDIN and STDOUT.
While this is fundamentally true, Mime-encoding the relevant output --
the signed message and the signature -- allows for intelligent treatment
by the mail agent. This provides the option for increased functionality
in the form of automatic signature checking, key retrieval, prompting
for passphrases for encrypted email.
> 2) if you can use "nowadays", it's not that standard. Standards are
> pretty much defined by their static quality, hence the fact that RFCs
> aren't edited, they're superseded.
RFC 2015 dates from 1996. Like all RFCs, it's static. The rest of the
world has had five years to implement this standard. Much of it has. A
portion of the non-adoption can be blamed on patents and other
encumbrances against widespread adoption of encryption technology.
> 3) This is one of the few cases where it's not MS's fault. Mutt made
> some spectacular changes, and defined a standard to fit them (SOP so
> far).
Um. An *open* standard. Submitted to the IETF RFC process. Better
than, say, standards such as SMB, .NET, or MS Word .doc format.
Innovation's got to happen somehow, doesn't it? The PGP/MIME standard
*is* a standard, and follows the recommended route. If this is SOP,
it's highly encouraged.
> Nobody else has really implemented the standard, yet mutt users
> yell and scream that everyone else is not standards compliant.
It makes us feel morally superior.
Other MUA implementations of RFC 2015:
- emacs
- exmh
- premail (Netscape plugin)
- TkRat
- XFMail
- KMail
- XCMail
- Sylpheed
- MS Outlook (plugin)
- MS Outlook Express (plugin)
- Eudora (plugin)
- Datula (plugin)
- Edmax (plugin)
- Mulberry (plugin)
- PMMail (native)
- Turnpike (native)
- Claris [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Mixmaster
- ishmail
- Voodo (Amiga)
For a lists:
http://rmarq.pair.com/pgp/mail-clients-pgp.html
http://www.spinnaker.de/mutt/rfc2015.html
> The rest of the world IS compliant, just not to mutt's amended
> standards. To be precise, there's a mode in mutt that breaks even
> pine compatibility: a signed message shows up as an attachment under
> some circumstances. I have no fears that pine's going to arbitrarily
> run code, but I just trash the "all attachment" messages anyway:
> life's too short to deal with non-inline text. I haven't had this
> problem on d-u, I found out about the mode on another list, and FWIU
> it takes a pretty perverse person to make the setting.
Pine's got the problem of being non-free. Unless UW wants to implement
2015 compatibility, users are stuck with patching the code themselves.
I'd not hold Pine up as an exemplar of free software of standards
compliance.
The email MIME standard (RFC 1521) also holds that quoted-printable text
(an RFC 2015 payload) should be rendered as inline text.
5.1. Quoted-Printable Content-Transfer-Encoding
The Quoted-Printable encoding is intended to represent data that
largely consists of octets that correspond to printable characters
in the ASCII character set. It encodes the data in such a way that
the resulting octets are unlikely to be modified by mail transport.
If the data being encoded are mostly ASCII text, the encoded form of
the data remains largely recognizable by humans. A body which is
entirely ASCII may also be encoded in Quoted-Printable to ensure the
integrity of the data should the message pass through a
character-translating, and/or line-wrapping gateway.
...so, arguably, at worst a mail client should display the body of the
message but treat the signature as an attachment.
Cheers.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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