For Windows

[Werner Koch]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:17, rjh at sixdemonbag.org said:

> Inline signatures /are/ standards.  RFC 4880 is far newer than RFC 3156:
> by your logic, 4880 should supersede 3156 and we should all move to the
> current standard and abandon 3156 support.

You are mixing the MIME standards with the OpenPGP standard.  OpenPGP
may be used with mail much like you can use JPEGs with MIME (inline
uuencoded or MIME?).

OpenPGP does not say much about mail, except for:

Section 7 (cleartext signatures) has this remark:

  (Note that this framework is not intended to be reversible.  RFC 3156
   [RFC3156] defines another way to sign cleartext messages for
   environments that support MIME.)

and in the implementation nits:

  * ASCII armor is an optional feature of OpenPGP.  
    [...]
    Moreover, implementations of OpenPGP-MIME [RFC3156] already have a
    requirement for ASCII armor so those implementations will
    necessarily have support.

thus I conclude that email is not part of OpenPGP's business.  The armor
stuff is actually a relict from BBS times!  Now if it comes to mail,
everyone agrees that you have to use MIME if you want so send anything
which is not plain ASCII text.  MOSS and thus PGP/MIME in the OpenPGP
case is the correct MIME container for encrypted and signed messages.

Embedding armored OpenPGP messages in plain ASCII mail or even MIME is
as antiquated as uuencoding is.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner  (kerckhoffs!wheatstone!vigenere!wk)


-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.