Re: The hidden fox

William H. Geiger III (whgiii@invweb.net)
Fri, 05 Jun 1998 03:35:32 -0500

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In <19980605080633.A8506@isil.d.shuttle.de>, on 06/05/98
   at 08:06 AM, Werner Koch <wk@isil.d.shuttle.de> said:

>> *All* e-mail clients that support PGP can process clear-signed messages.

>Mutt has _only_ no support to create armored messages - and this is good
>has it forces people to switch over to MIME.

Well what it does is make it incompatible with the majority of PGP users
thus inconveniencing both the users of Mutt and those who are attempting
to communicate with them.

In my PGP implementations I allow the user 3 settings:

1 - No MIME
2 - When Needed MIME
3 - Always MIME

With option 2 being the default. Option #2 only PGP/MIME formats a message
if the message is already in MIME format *before* being passed on for pgp
processing.

Of the messages that I have received 99% are RFC 822, the other 1% that
are in MIME format the vast majority are so to support such worthless
formats as text/html, text/rtf, vcard attachment and other worthless junk
attached to the message. Occasional I will send/receive files via e-mail
but uuencode works just as well as doing base64 mime attachments.

MIME for the most part is "much to do about nothing" when it comes to
e-mail and *forcing* users to switch when it is not needed is anything but
a GoodThing(tm).

FWIW this is an old issue that has been hashed out on the PGP/MIME mailing
list and also referenced at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/emailpgp_5

- --
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 5.0 at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgp.html
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

 
Tag-O-Matic: Have you crashed your Windows today?

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• Next message: Kriston J. Rehberg: "Personal Certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook"
• Previous message: Eric Young: "Re: Looking for Symmetric Key Hardware Accelerators"
• In reply to: Adam Shostack: "Re: Looking for Symmetric Key Hardware Accelerators"
• Next in thread: Tomas Fasth: "MIME (was: The hidden fox)"
• Reply: Tomas Fasth: "MIME (was: The hidden fox)"