MUA questions

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Thursday 05 February 2004 22:32, Atom 'Smasher' wrote:
> > > the body of an email should really only contain plain-old ascii.
> >
> > Err. No. I cannot even write the names of several people I know
> > just using plain ascii. Neither can I write all the words I use in
> > day to day e-mail just using plain ascii. It might work for the
> > english speaking folks out there, who aren't from
> > german/swedish/whatever ancestry, but other languages *depend* on
> > characters which cannot be found in the ascii charset.
> >
> > And for these people inline signing *does* break extremely quickly.
> >
> > Just sharing my € 0.02,
                    ^^^

> that said, i do apologize for assuming that everyone uses the same
> keyboard as i do. i thought that email is only supposed to be 7-bit,
> and i never thought about compatibility issues when using OpenPGP
> with 8-bit text.... are there problems with that? how so?

That's very funny because your own reply answers this question. See 
above. In your reply Ralph's Euro symbol (€) has been converted to 
something really strange (because obviously your pine wasn't able to 
decode the utf-8 encoded symbol correctly). This misinterpretation 
could easily have broken an inline signature. Luckily Ralph used a 
PGP/MIME signature. This way the message is first encoded (== converted 
from 8-bit to 7-bit) and then the encoded 7-bit text is signed 
preventing any problems that might be caused by misinterpreted 8-bit 
characters.

Regards,
Ingo
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