8-bit message encrypted by gnupg appears as 7-bit after decryption?

[Matthew.van.Eerde at hbinc.com]

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Jens wrote:
> this might be a silly question but my curiosity has not been
> satisfied after three days of continuous web searching so i hope
> somebody will humour me. 
> 
> kmail encodes some of my utf-8 emails as base64. this happens when i
> dont allow 8bit and when i type arabic.

base64 use 7-bit safe characters.

> my question is this: after an outgoing message is encrypted with
> gnupg the body of the message appears as 7bit. meaning that when it
> arrives as the recipient he/she will have no way of knowing the
> original encoding after decryption.

gnupg uses 7-bit safe characters.
Is the base64 encoding being encrypted, or the original 8bit data?  I'd
guess the original 8bit data.

> does this never cause problems? how can the mua know whether the
> original email was 7bit, 8bit or base64?

It doesn't know or care.  It gets the 7bit encrypted data and passes it
on to gnupg.
gnupg decrypts the original contents - probably the 8bit data.
 
> i should also say that i have not had any problems but then again
you
> rarely do when emailing yourself. i would just really like to know
> how the recipient knows what type of body he is dealing with.
> 
> thanks

Test by getting a free webmail account and emailing something there?

Matthew.van.Eerde at hbinc.com                      805.964.4554 x902
Hispanic Business Inc./HireDiversity.com         Software Engineer
perl -e"map{y/a-z/l-za-k/;print}shift" "Jjhi pcdiwtg Ptga wprztg,"
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