Windows and GnuPG

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Sat Sep 11 18:10:12 1999, you wrote:
> Some people I write to complain that they recieve messages from me that
> appear to have two attachments (or perhaps parts) one is the actual message
> while the other is a *.dat file (GnuPG signing information).  Both people
> use a combination of Pegasus Mail and/or Outlook Express.  Is it typical of
> Windows email clients to do strange things like this?  I've tried it myself
> with outlook express and it does infact claim a GnuPG message has two parts,
> both of which it cannot identify, but I am given the option to open.  The
> *.txt file is the message while the *.dat is the hash.

Assuming the mail from you is signed and composed like the Mutt mailer does
it (which is the format described in RFC2015), it looks like this to a
MIME-aware reader:

The mail is multipart, of the "multipart/signed" subtype.

It consists of two parts ("attachments"). The first is plain text (content
type "text/plain") which any reader should know about, the other is
"application/pgp-signature", which only RFC 2015-aware mailers know anything
about.

Any MIME-aware reader should be OK with this. How it should _display_ the
mail is another question. If it doesn't know about RFC 2015, it cannot grok
the "signed" in "multipart/signed", and might decide that nothing should be
displayed "inline". You then get exactly what you describe above.

However, if I was a mail reader and saw a multipart mail where exactly one
of the attachments was plain text and all the others were non-displayable, I
would display that text part. But I don't think MIME says I _must_ do it.

Sorry about all the "quotes" above ;-)

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn
\X/ <jorgen.grahn@opensoftware.se>