Mutt not showing signature flag

Simon Ward simon at bleah.co.uk
Thu Dec 23 16:49:27 CET 2010


On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 08:29:33AM -0700, Aaron Toponce wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 01:59:11PM +0000, Simon Ward wrote:
> > After a little investigation I believe signed mails that have had
> > signatures from mailing lists attached are not decoded until you view
> > the message.  I’m guessing that Mutt only checks for Content-Type
> > multipart/signed, but these messages are multipart/mixed.
> 
> I want to believe that, but it's not the case, at least not for me. On
> say the debian-devel mailing list, I can see the signature flag on the
> message before I fetch it (I only cache the headers).

I suppose I should have been more clear, especially given we are talking
about cryptographic signatures.  When I said “signatures from mailing
lists”, I meant the plain text footers that get appended to single
messages.

With PGP/MIME signed messages sent to (at least GNU Mailman) lists that
add footers, the mail is wrapped in another MIME message of type
multipart/mixed, and another part containing the signature is added.

I’m not on debian-devel, but none of the Debian lists I am on appear to
attach these footers.  Indeed, looking at the debian-devel archives,
that list doesn’t either.

> ... now that I think about it, is the gnupg-users mailing list modifying
> mail headers and stripping/modifying PGP info?

The information isn’t lost in the above case, just contained in a MIME
subpart.

> As you mentioned, changing from multipart/signed to multipart/mixed,
> which would prevent the signature flags from showing until after you
> view the message in the pager?

Yes, I think this is what is happening.

Simon
-- 
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.—John Gall
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: </pipermail/attachments/20101223/1cef4e00/attachment.pgp>


More information about the Gnupg-users mailing list