On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 03:41:09PM -0700, Aaron Toponce wrote: > On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 04:27:38PM -0500, Ed Blackman wrote: > > There are two kinds of PGP encrypted or signed messages: PGP/MIME > > and traditional inline. But only PGP/MIME can be detected in the > > headers of the message. My guess is that mutt shows the flags for > > the more common PGP/MIME messages all the time, because mutt has to > > parse the header for the fields that show up in the index. For > > traditional inline PGP, mutt only shows the flags after it's had to > > parse the body to display it in the pager. > > This would make sense, except for the gnupg-users mailing list. I've > been on the list for a while, and refuse to believe that everyone signs > inline, and no one uses PGP/MIME. Also, after leaving the mailbox, and > coming back to it, any signed flags that did show after reading a signed > message are no longer present.
This absolutely makes sense -- every bit of what you describe. Mutt does not save the state of a mailbox once it leaves that mailbox... so if it has to parse the message to determine that it is signed when you first see a message, it will need to do so *every time you visit that mailbox*. As for using in-line signatures, it's still very common to do so, because (at least as of the last time I looked into this) many of the most popular mail clients (including Pine and some derivatives, and the MS-Outlook family) could not handle PGP-MIME messages *at all*. Thus many people who are familiar with PGP and communicate with such people persist in using the old form, because it's more portable. It's easy enough to confirm... just look at the raw content of the message. If you don't see MIME parts headers, but you DO see stuff like > ----- BEGIN PGP MESSAGE ----- > ----- END PGP MESSAGE ----- ...then you have yourself a traditional PGP message. For example, this post to gnupg-users absolutely IS a traditional in-line PGP message: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/gnupg/users/52282?do=post_view_threaded#52282 A casual glance suggests there are many such messages. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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