On 2018-06-02 07:59:07 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 7:03 AM, Peter J. Holzer <hjp-pyt...@hjp.at> wrote: > > On 2018-05-31 14:42:39 -0700, Paul wrote: > >> I have heard that attachments to messages are not allowed on this list, > >> which makes sense. However I notice that messages from Peter do have an > >> attachment, i.e., a signature.asc file. > > > > No this is isn't an attachment. It's a signature. Your MUA probably > > displays everything it can't handle as an "attachment". > > Which, I might point out, is a decent way to handle unknown parts. The > user is shown that there's an extra part, and can view it as an > external file.
Which makes very little sense with a signature. By itself it is useless,
it is only useful together with the content part.
I consider this very poor UI design. There are only a handful multipart
types defined in MIME, each with clear semantics. For multipart/signed,
there are basically 2 things you can do if you don't support the
signature algorithm: Ignore the signature completely, or display an
indication that this part is signed but you can't verify the signature
(the latter might also offer a way to pass the entire multipart/signed
to an external program). But offering to view/save the signature alone
is useless and only confuses the user.
(This is especially baffling for programs which already support
multipart/signed, but not the specific signature type. What was the
developer thinking?)
hp
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_ | Peter J. Holzer | we build much bigger, better disasters now
|_|_) | | because we have much more sophisticated
| | | h...@hjp.at | management tools.
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Ross Anderson <https://www.edge.org/>
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