Lines Beginning with "From" Dash-Escaped?

[Ingo Klöcker]

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On Saturday, 28. April 2001 17:25, Nick Andriash wrote:
> Does anyone know if you are able to turn this feature off in PGP?

This is from the man page of PGP2.6.3in:

CLEARSIG - Enable Clear-Signed Output
 
       Default setting:  CLEARSIG = on
 
       Normally, a signed and ASCII-armored PGP message  is  gib­
       berish,  even though the text is not encrypted.  This pre­
       vents munging by mailers, but requires PGP to simply  read
       the message.
 
       If CLEARSIG is enabled, then when signing and ASCII-armor­
       ing a text file, PGP uses a different format that includes
       the  plaintext  in  human-readable  form.  Lines beginning
       with "-" are quoted with "- ".  To cope with some  of  the
       stupider mailers in the world, lines beginning with "From"
       are also quoted,  and  trailing  whitespace  on  lines  is
       stripped.   PGP  will  remove the quoting if you use it to
       decrypt the message, but the trailing  whitespace  is  not
       recovered.   This  is still useful enough to be enabled by
       default.

So it seems it's not possible to turn off the escaping of "From " lines 
in PGP without turning of clear-signed output. But this would lead to 
messages which are unreadable by people who don't use PGP because then 
the signed message will be Radix64 encoded.

> IK> Reason:
>
> Thank you Ingo for a very clear and concise explanation of the
> reasoning behind this feature. I shall, with your permission,  pass
> on that information to my PGP-Basics Group, many of which including
> myself use GnuPG.

You are welcome to do so.

Regards,
Ingo
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