pgp/mime vs in-line pgp

[Simon Josefsson]

Len Sassaman <rabbi at abditum.com> writes:

> I am a Pine user. I believe Mutt to be greatly at fault for much of the
> PGP/MIME issues, by their repeated propaganda attempts to convince PGP
> users that inline-signatures are "old-style" or "deprecated" in favor of
> the PGP/MIME format (originally devised by the author of Mutt,
> surprisingly enough.)

For messaging applications, I don't think it is unreasonable to
consider plain OpenPGP is "old-style" and "deprecated".  Quoting RFC
2440:

   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.

For plain OpenPGP to work in e-mail, you pretty much need to only use
ASCII.  If you want to be compatible with PGP 2.x/5.x, there are even
more restrictions (no dash-escaped text, allegedly you also need to
remove trailing whitespace which would break format=flowed, and
probably more that I forget).

Regards,
Simon