First, a quick correction: SMIME would be interpreted by most folks
as S/MIME, and that's the spec described in RFCs 2311 (message
format) and 2312 (certs). There may be some MUAs that implement it;
I don't know which. I've never seen it in use, as far as I know.
When I last heard it discussed, some years ago, it seemed like it
was being promulgated by the camp that wants everything done with
centralized certification authorities; I've never been concerned
with trying to make certification authorities more lucrative, only
with privacy, so I stuck with PGP:-).
The MIME format supported by Mutt for crypto is RFC 2015, I think
I've sometimes seen people refer to it as PGP/MIME. Mutt implements
it; I've read on this list recently that someone was introducing
support for it into some GUI MUA as well. Aside from that, it's not
supported as far as I know.
Now on to the issues you discuss: Outlook is extra special (in the
Politically Correct sense of the word, like the Special Olympics);
besides going out of its way to make it easy for random strangers
to do whatever they want to the victim's (Outlook user's) machine,
it also goes out of its way to make it difficult to read PGP/MIME
messages; way way harder than a completely non-MIME MUA like e.g.
/bin/mail.
There are two responses that could be taken to this state of
affairs.
You could go out of your way to send "traditional PGP" messages.
Just turn off PGP signing in mutt, and use your editor to sign
the message. In mine, I just filtered the message through "gpg
--clearsign" to get messages signed that way. I use the past tense;
I've signed off the one mailing list that blocked PGP/MIME messages.
As for Windows users, they choose to do Windows to themselves; on
the very rare occasions that they complain about my email, I point
'em at RFC 2015, and encourage them to complain to the author of
their email software --- or switch to email software that doesn't
have the problems they're suffering from.
-Bennett
PGP signature
