[gnupg-users] MUA questions

[Todd]

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David Alban wrote:
> I used to make the signature an attachment.  Some folks would inform
> me that they "couldn't open the attachment I sent them".  At least
> once, a recipient's mail program wouldn't show them the message
> body.

Haha, that's got to be MS Lookout Express!  Odd too, it will run just
about any virus you feed it, but it balks at an RFC compliant MIME
message.  And people pay good money to Billy...  Sheesh.

> So I compose my message and invoke the clearsigning macro just
> before sending.  What results is a simple ascii message without
> attachments.  All mailers can handle that, right? :-)

Most of them can.  Once again, that silly old virus propagation
platform, Outhouse Express, has problems even with inline messages if
the content-type for the message is application/pgp, which was a sort
of informal standard among inline enabled MUA's.  Mutt 1.4.1 generates
this type of message when you set pgp_create_traditional=yes.  There
are patches available[1] to change this to use text/plain and in fact,
the more recent development versions of mutt do this by default.  The
mutt developers got sick of getting complaints from users of other
MUA's that they couldn't read the inline messages mutt was sending.

If you decide to update your mutt from 1.2.5 to the more recent stable
version 1.4.1, I highly recommend Dale's patches.  They work
wonderfully and will give you all that you have now without the need
for any macro.  Even if you go all the way to the bleeding edge 1.5
series (which is quite stable in my experience), Dale's pgp-menu-trad
patch is quite useful.  It makes it easy to see whether you're about
to send a message using PGP/MIME or inline format.

One thing that might convince you to upgrade is that 1.2.5 contains a
remotely exploitable security hole.  This was fixed in 1.2.5.1. See
the Mutt News[2] page for info.

Anyway, that's enough ranting and raving about mutt I guess.  It's not
like they're paying me to try and market for them.  :)

[1] http://www.woolridge.ca/mutt/ (either pgp-menu-traditional or just
    pgp-traditional will force text/plain instead of application/pgp
    for inline, ie traditional, pgp messages.)
[2] http://www.mutt.org/news.html

- -- 
Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xD654075A | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
======================================================================
The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger
pain the second time around.
    -- Herb Caen, 1981, in San Francisco Chronicle

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