Are .ems attachments necessary?

Todd Freedom_Lover at pobox.com
Fri Feb 6 19:23:33 CET 2004


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Thomas Spuhler wrote:
> I am actually an Evo user. What attachments or problems are we
> talking about? I don't see any .ems attachments.

Your message would show up as an .ems attachment to many Eudora users.
It would be an attachment of some sort to other MUA's.  Those MUA's
are basically broken as far as I am concerned.  A PGP/MIME signature,
like you just used, is a simple MIME message and the fist part of it
is marked as text/plain.  Often, these messages also have a
content-disposition of inline, though your message doesn't have that.
AFAIK, an MUA should display the text/plain part, even if it is
incapable of verifying the attached PGP signature.  Many MUA's don't
do this, and it's a constant argument over who's right and who's
wrong.

> Of course the inline signature is in plain text, but..

Indeed.  The Evo developers punted and decided that they couldn't work
with inline signatures at all.  I think that's rather unfortunate,
since so many other MUA's clearly deal well with inline signatures.
But at least they chose to implement PGP/MIME, which has the benefit
of an RFC to define it.

- -- 
Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xD654075A | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
======================================================================
capitalism is control of the state by the economy, communism/socialism
is control of the economy by the state... generally

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