On 2000-06-13 15:44:47 -0400, Peter L. Berghold wrote:
> Maybe I have a case of the stupids here, but I used the
> gpgrc file that comes with the source distro and when I
> sign a mail with my GPG signature the entire message
> gets converted to SMIME format.
S/MIME is something mutt doesn't understand or generate
currently.
More precisely, it's some set of standards based on pkcs
#7, X.509 certificates, and the framework from RFC 1847
(multipart/{signed,encrypted}, originally specified for
use by MOSS). Don't ask me for details, I'm not really
familiar with S/MIME.
The framework from RFC 1847 is quite general, and can also
be applied to PGP. The resulting format is called
PGP/MIME, and specified in RFC 2015. That's what mutt
uses.
The benefit from this framework is that the message's
content is (1) signed completely, including MIME headers
and the like, and (2) the content is still accessible for
MIME MUAs which don't know anything about PGP, S/MIME or
the like - for that software, multipart/signed just looks
like another unsupported multipart, which consists of two
parts: Nested usable data, and something strange called
signature, which isn't handled.
> This may be OK for some MUAs out there, but when I send
> mail to where I work from home using mutt and sign them
> with GPG the recipient is going to see this from
> Micro$oft Outlook which does horrible things to SMIME.
> Also because of this it would appear that the PGP
> client for windows can't figure out how to verify the
> signature when it is in SMIME format.
I'd suggest you complain to Microsoft and Network
Associates. It's their responsibility to get the support
for this right; what mutt does ist the standard (ok,
proposed standard) way of using PGP with e-mail.
> Maybe my memory is warped, but I seem to remember that
> PGP normally signs messages keeping the body of the
> email in text format. Is there a way of doing the same
> thing under the GPG/Mutt combination? Or am I stuck
> with SMIME format messages when I sign them?
--
http://www.guug.de/~roessler/
