Does GnuPG implement MIME support?

Thomas Roessler roessler at does-not-exist.org
Sat Jul 15 21:26:12 CEST 2000


On 2000-07-15 09:39:26 -0700, Nathan Thompson-Amato wrote:

> My major concern at this point is that it'll make a
> mess of the current code if I decrypt a MIME'd PGP
> message, then have to send the results back through the
> MIME decoder to handle other MIME types.  But that's my
> problem. :-)

Well, it's indeed essentially what you should do. ;-)

>> Note, BTW, that forwarding messages as message/rfc822
>> body parts can get kind of tough when you are
>> signing: With PGP/MIME, you have to make sure that
>> you stick with _strict_ MIME, and avoid _any_ 8bit
>> encodings.

> I'm a bit confused.  RFC 822 says it only allows ASCII
> characters, and I could've sworn ASCII was 7-bit.  Do
> you just mean that I need to make sure that restriction
> is enforced?

Yes.  There is this thing called 8bit-MIME which is
supported by some ESMTP transport agents, and generated by
lots of MUAs.  In practice, you may encounter structures
like this one:

	multipart/mixed [8bit]
	|
	+-- multipart/mixed [8bit]
	|   +-- text/plain [8bit]	(*)
	|   `-- image/jpeg [base64]
	`-- text/plain [quoted-printable] 

When forwarding or signing this, you'd have to recode the
inner text/plain attachment (*), and change the encoding
on all the multipart/mixed to 7bit.

>> Will Evolution's calendar be able to read ical
>> ~/.calendar files? (Not iCalendar, you say that, but
>> ical, like in /usr/bin/ical.)

> I doubt it.  

What a pity.

> I'm sure the Evolution people wouldn't mind it if
> somebody added support, though.  ;-)

-- 
Thomas Roessler              <roessler at does-not-exist.org>



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