question regarding gnupg in my regular signature

[Andrew McDonald]

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On Thu, Dec 14, 2000 at 07:36:33PM +0000, Graham wrote:

> AM> 
> AM> PGP/MIME has advantages over the older application/pgp format, and it
> AM> would be nice to see it supported by all the mailers that offer "pgp
> AM> support". The pgp/mime standard in rfc2015 is 4 years old, and lots of
> AM> MUAs seem to support S/MIME. :)
> AM> RFC 2440, does after all say: "An application that implements OpenPGP
> AM> for messaging SHOULD implement OpenPGP-MIME." (See RFC2119 for the
> AM> meaning of 'SHOULD').
> 
> You're probably right, but specifically what advantages?

Some are advantages for the mailer, e.g. single MIME standard for
encrypted/signed e-mail (PGP/MIME is essentially the same as S/MIME in
its basic structure).

Some for the user, e.g. you can encrypt and sign attachments along with
the e-mail body, you can extract the original message without having to
pull off the PGP wrappings yourself. The first of those two is probably
one I find most useful. AFAIK, with the Outlook plug-in you would need
to separately encrypt/sign any attachments first (I'll double check
that tomorrow).

I think the 'clear-signing' method was probably created because, at the
time, there was no other way to do it. I think with MIME as a standard
PGP/MIME somehow becomes 'more obvious'.

> PGP has a plug-in which integrates more seamlessly with Outlook than
> Eudora or Outlook Express.  The problem I would think is that you're
> trying to get a MUA (Mutt) which defaults to PGP/MIME under Linux, to
> produce something which can be understood by a Windows application
> (Outlook) for which there is no PGP/MIME support.  Despite somebody
> telling me that this difference is not an OS problem, but an
> application problem, most Windows MUAs do not have PGP/MIME support if
> they have PGP.

Actually, I think there are probably quite a few more MUAs under Linux
that support PGP in a non-PGP/MIME form than support PGP/MIME.

With the Outlook plug-in, it simply processes the content of the text
edit window, getting it to do the header/structure modifications for
PGP/MIME (or even setting the content-type to application/pgp) is
probably more difficult to do from a plug-in.

> AM> By terming my macros "a bit of a cludge". I meant that mutt's PGP/MIME
> AM> support was so nice, easy and clean to use; using these macros seem
> AM> very horrible in comparison. :(
> 
> I understand that, but for we Windows users, PGP/MIME seems so
> unwieldy, so non-standard, and suspicious as we try to avoid
> attachments....  Its just your point of view....

Well, if the mailer supported PGP/MIME you wouldn't see any
attachments, just as you don't with an MUA that supports S/MIME on
S/MIME encoded messages. ;-)

Best wishes,

Andrew
- -- 
Andrew McDonald
E-mail: andrew@mcdonald.org.uk
http://www.mcdonald.org.uk/andrew/
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