OpenPGP parts and plain text in the same email

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Thursday 18 August 2011, Hauke Laging wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> probably all of you know the problem that users of that one *******
> kind of mail client tell you that they cannot read your emails like
> the ones from other people. There was just an "attachment" which
> they have to open in order to read the text. And of course, that
> other one attachment with nonsense data...
> 
> This is more an email question than a GnuPG question: Mail clients
> are capable of sending both an HTML and a plain text version of the
> content within one email. I wonder whether it is possible to send
> emails in the same way with a plain text part and an alternative
> PGP/MIME part. "Solving" the outlook problem this way might increase
> the acceptance of OpenPGP.

It is certainly possible to do this, but
- I doubt that any existing mail client supports this out-of-the box
- it might not help because apparently this one mail client does not 
handle multipart-mime correctly, so why should it support something 
strange like a multipart/alternative message with a text/plain part and 
a PGP/MIME part.

I don't think it's worth the effort thinking about this. In fact, it 
might be better to ignore the problem because everytime a user of such a 
mail client asks you why you've sent him such a strange message you can 
tell him that his mail client is broken and that he'd be much better off 
with standard-compliant mail client <insert your favorite mail client>.

Apart from that I'm pretty sure that only very old versions of Outlook 
[Express] have those problems.


Regards,
Ingo
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