Are .ems attachments necessary?

[Todd]

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W. D. wrote:
> I just joined this group a few days ago, and am finding that some of
> the email messages are contained in .ems attachments.  I don't
> understand why this is necessary.  Can't the text be put in the body
> of email?

Those message do contain text/plain message bodies.  Your MUA is
simply not displaying them as such because it does not support the
PGP/MIME RFCs, 2015 and 3156, the latter of which supersedes the
former.  AFAIK, there is a PGP plugin available that will allow you to
read and verify these messages, though I have not used Eudora (or
windows for that matter) since the 3.0 or maybe 4.0 days, so my memory
could be shoddy here.

> To me these .ems attachments add a whole level of unnecessary
> complication to the situation.

And to others they alleviate many common problems with inline
signatures.  It's a matter of preferences.  It's been discussed to
death.  Take a look through the archives and search the net for
PGP/MIME and you'll have hours of fun reading.

> Also, I've found that emails from "Alfred M. Szmidt" crash Eudora
> 5.1, so I've had to set up a filter to trash those emails rather
> than having to reboot each time Eudora brings Windows down.  (Yes, I
> know Windows is crappy.  I have several other computers running
> FreeBSD, & Linux)

It sounds like a bug in Eudora to me.  You might want to check if
there's a newer version available.  I know that there are 6.0 versions
of Eudora that have been out for some time.  If upgrading to that
isn't an option, maybe there's a more recent 5.x series that fixes
the bug.

> Can anyone explain why these .ems attachments are required?

Required isn't the right word.  PGP/MIME is preferred by some users.
Some MUA's simply don't support sending the old inline style of
signatures, Evolution is the only one I can think of at the moment,
but there may be others.  I think a decent MUA will be liberal in what
it accepts, meaning that neither inline signatures nor PGP/MIME will
cause the user problems.

- -- 
Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xD654075A | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
======================================================================
I would have made a good Pope.
    -- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)

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