Mutt/GnuPG doc initial release

[Werner Koch]

On Sun, 23 Sep 2001 21:53:37 -0700 (PDT), Len Sassaman said:

> This is not correct. The only people who refer to the inline ASCII-armored
> signatures as "outdated" are the Mutt developers. Read the RFCs.

RFC2440 2.4:

   Note that many applications, particularly messaging applications,
   will want more advanced features as described in the OpenPGP-MIME
   document, RFC 2015. An application that implements OpenPGP for
   messaging SHOULD implement OpenPGP-MIME.

> Frankly, it's poor netiquette to post PGP/MIME messages to mailing lists,

I think this is a pretty U.S.centric position.  Using ASCII armor you
have to stick to Latin-1 so that most clients are able to understand
it.  Well, you can specify a different character set but in this case
your MUA is already MIME aware.  So there is no point in that.

Furthermore, it is not possible to send signed or encrypted
attachments using ASCII armor.  Or should we go back to uuencode?
MIME is around for so many years and the 5 years old rfc2045-47 are in
draft standard status.  The original MIME RFC is even older than PGP 2.

With the same argumentation you could also say that it is poor
netiquette to use OpenPGP instead of PGP 2.

> Inline ASCII-armoring is the standard method for signing email. It is also
> the only method directly specified in RFC 2440.

Not true, see above.

> An important part of any GnuPG/Mutt FAQ would be instructions on how to
> configure Mutt to make compatible OpenPGP signatures in the traditional
> method. (No, this does not mean the broken Application/PGP method

Rember the golden rule of internet standards?  Mutt and most other
recent MUAs do exactly this.  The only MUA _I_know_ which has problems
with OpenPGP-MIME is Outlook.


  Werner

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