On Mon, Aug 09, 1999 at 12:18:17PM +0200, Thomas Roessler wrote:
> On 1999-08-08 23:38:32 -0700, rex wrote:
>
> > Why do you call a convention that was in use worldwide for several
> > years and perfectly functional, a bug?
>
> While it's not an actual bug, it's _not_ perfectly functional.
>
> There are several issues with traditional cleartext PGP signatures:
Yes, I agree. I was thinking of encryption, which has always worked
well for me.
> - When your mail user agent doesn't support PGP, it has no decent
> access to the signed text. Not very nice.
But I don't understand this. The signature is just part of the message
and doesn't interfere with reading the signed part of the message
at all, IME.
> > And what's wrong with backwards compatibility?
>
> Nothing. That's why Mutt is actually able to _receive_
> traditional-style PGP signed message, but sends PGP signed messages
> in a format which complies with RFC 2015, a Proposed Internet
> Standard.
After procmail is used to fix up the message, yes. BTW, I was reading
about RFC 2015 and the opinion was expressed that it probably would
NOT become a standard due to some issues that I don't remember. You're
in a much better position to evaluate this than I am.
> Note, BTW, that PGP 6.5.1 seems to have some code to handle
> PGP/MIME. At least I recall to have seen options referring to this
> in some examples. You may wish to further investigate this.
Thanks, I'll have a look. However, almost all of my PGP needs require
the traditional format and there is nothing I can do to change that
as I have no control over the other end of the link. I think it's
unfortunate that the Mutt developers haven't recognized that this
is a common situation and allowed for it as an option instead of
forcing the user to spend time working around the problem.
-rex
