attachments

[David K. Trudgett]

On Monday 2001-09-24 at 19:43:33 -0600, Lee Roberts wrote:

> Why do people in this list post their messages as attachments? I
> trash those messages since you never know if they contain a virus.

You must have missed the lengthy discussion about that just today.

The reason is that they are not "attachments" actually, but multi-part
MIME messages with a disposition of "inline", which means they are
part of the message body and are not attachments. Your MUA (Eudora) is
disregarding the "inline" status of the MIME parts, probably because
it is not recognising the "multipart/signed" and/or
"application/pgp-signature" MIME types. This is not very clever of
Eudora, especially since we are not dealing with new standards.

Here is an example from a recently posted message on this list:


> Message-ID: <20010924162512.A19260@fishbowl.madduck.net>
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1;
>         protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="k1lZvvs/B4yU6o8G"
> Content-Disposition: inline
        
Notice the "inline" disposition. The message text followed. Then the
signature followed in another MIME part:


> --k1lZvvs/B4yU6o8G
> Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
> Content-Disposition: inline
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org
> 
> iEYEARECAAYFAjuvQkcACgkQIgvIgzMMSnU9mQCbBh3jTj78zgoROCJ+sT149++X
> D88AnRw1BWtZlJ6tyeBvoXXcSfxnzCma
> =jmCR
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> 
> --k1lZvvs/B4yU6o8G--

The disposition here is also "inline".


So, I think that the answer here is that your version of Eudora (which
is not the latest one) does not handle multi-part inline MIME parts
correctly (or at least if they happen to be of type "multipart/signed"
or "application/pgp-signature"). Perhaps you could upgrade to the
latest version and/or get Qualcomm to fix their product.


Regards,

David Trudgett