ASCII armor plus?

Robert J. Hansen rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Wed Dec 26 13:42:02 CET 2012


On 12/26/2012 6:01 AM, Werner Koch wrote:
> Actually the OpenPGP armor format is pretty robust to the extend it can
> be.  However, you are likely talking about mail.  Here I can only
> suggest to use PGP/MIME - it is part of the MIME standard and should be
> supported by all sane mail clients.  It is a *16 year* old standard and
> has been implemented even earlier.

A word of caution may be in order: PGP/MIME is a fragile format and does
not play nice with mailers (remailers, mailing list software, MTAs,
anything in the chain) that plays with attachments.  There are a
surprising lot of these out there: for instance, the PGP-Basics mailing
list at Yahoo! Groups is configured to strip all attachments, which
means that PGP/MIME signatures on that mailing list are simply impossible.

GnuPG-Users and Enigmail-Users have each within recent memory had
mailing list software (GNU Mailman) which broke PGP/MIME signatures.

When the community's flagship mailing lists cannot reliably use
PGP/MIME, I'm a little cautious about recommending PGP/MIME as a
general-purpose, ready-for-the-end-user solution.




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