Pros and cons of PGP/MIME for outgoing e-mail?

[Werner Koch]

On Mon, 24 Nov 2014 21:48, bre at pagekite.net said:

> 1. Mail clients have user interfaces that are at least somewhat
> optimized for conversations, like the one we are having now. Moving the
> text part into a container (rfc2822 or otherwise) breaks that flow for
> everyone.

Right.  However, we, who raised up in a mail based discussion culture,
tend to use free software MUAs and thus it will be easy to fix them for
that case.  All the others anyway top post and don't quote.  Thus the
extra container should not add many extra problems.

> how the mail client is most often used. It is still an extra step
> though, and extra code to write in the MUA, which is one of the reasons
> I not sure about the merits of using a container at all.

Save, right click, unzip/decrypt, read.  From what I have see a pretty
common workflow at least on Windows.

> Note that if the container is a ZIP file, that will work without extra
> tools on all modern OSes (if I recall, I need to double-check a fresh
> Windows install), but that is certainly not true for RFC2822 or tar

They also open mail box files (.eml) without any problems.

> As stated in my post - my proposal makes life marginally worse for
> people with PGP/MIME compliant MUAs (working with attachments becomes
> less fun), but better for everyone else. I haven't come up with a way
> around that yet, short of shipping 2 of everything in each message. :-)

Everyone else is not signed or encrypting.  They need to install new
software anyway - why not do the right thing?


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner

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