GPG/PGP and Mail (was: Re: GnuPG: what email client should i use?)

[Sam Roberts]

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Quoting "L. Sassaman" <rabbi@quickie.net>, who wrote:
>=20
> On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, Horacio MG wrote:
>=20
> > El mi=E9, 26 de jul de 2000, a las 10:35:28 +0200, Nils Ellmenreich dij=
o:
> > >=20
> > > - If we leave S/MIME aside, you've still got to decide whether to use
> > > Ascii armor or PGP/MIME. I found (so far) no Unix-based mailreader
> > > that can handle both (but there might be some, who knows. Maybe pine).
> > > It really depends on the person you're mailing with which format to
> > > use.
> >=20
> > AFAIK mutt can handle both application/pgp (ascii) and pgp/mime.  It's
>=20
> application/pgp is not regular ASCII-armored mail. application/pgp should
> never be used.

It's deprecated by mutt, but they do support it. The preferred method is
the standard MIME multipart/encrypted and multipart/signed types.

> What is so wrong with using regular text?

The same thing that's wrong with pre-MIME uuencoded in-line files. MIME is
the right way to communicate that the message is signed or encrypted, not
stuffing strings into the message body. It's bound to be got wrong by
somebody (in uuencodings case you used to be able to put a string that
looked like the beginning of a uuencode attachment in mail, and outlook use=
rs
wouldn't be able to read it. Outlook would autodetect the attachment
and mangle the rest of the message, maybe you still can, so its a good way
to write secret email unreadable by many windows users...).

It's kind of frustrating that so few mailers understand MIME structured
pgp messages, even though they use MIME already. Does anybody know whether
the pgp support for Outlook or any other windows mailer has been updated
to grok the RFC1847/2015 MIME types?

Sam

p.s.

I don't have the RFCs handy, and my memory is poor, but I think pgp/mime
is the pre-OpenPRP RFC, and thus is NOT what mutt uses.

--=20
Sam Roberts (sam@cogent.ca), Cogent Real-Time Systems (www.cogent.ca)

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