Can't check pgp-6.5.8 signatura

[Andrew McDonald]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 10:54:45PM +0100, Owen Blacker wrote:

> > Content-Type: application/pgp; x-action=sign; format=text
> 
> I've deleted some of the headers (obv).  Was this message actually
> OpenPGP compliant, as pine gives me no way of accessing its content
> whatsoever.

I don't think OpenPGP itself specifies the way to send an OpenPGP
format message within a mail. (or does someone want to correct me on
this?)

There are, however, three ways (that I'm aware of) doing this:
1) PGP/MIME (RFC 3156)
2) application/pgp
3) what I'll call 'text/plain'

(1) is the strongly preferred way of doing it. It is the default in
mutt. In Outlook a signed message has an 'attachment' containing the
signature, for an encrypted message (IIRC) the whole thing appears as
an 'attachment'.

(2) is deprecated. It is available in mutt via the 'create_traditional'
option. Whether encrypted and/or signed the whole message appears as an
'attachment' in Outlook.

(3) is what the NAI PGP plug-in for Outlook does. It is the same as
(2), but the content type is set to 'text/plain'. The pgp filter for
pine that I used to use (a few years ago) also did this.

To me (2) seems more correct than (3). After all, the content isn't
text/plain is it? However, for signed mails in particular, it fails to
show the content in some MUAs, even though most of it is human
readable.

In my experience I'd prefer to use (1), but I sometimes have to use (3)
when I send encrypted/signed messages to people using Outlook.

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