Users GnuPG aims for? (Re: Breaking MIME concatenation)

[Andrew Gallagher]

On 17/05/18 09:33, Werner Koch wrote:
> and remember that mail is serious work and not for amusement.

I think you're screaming into the wind there... ;-)

More seriously though, properly marked-up text is demonstrably easier to
read. That's why people submit academic papers in Latex instead of
courier monospace with hand-drawn equations. At Patrick's suggestion I
have moved to "Simple HTML" in my tbird, but even that requires
noticeably more effort to scan and parse compared with "Original HTML"
with disabled remote content.

Featurism is absolutely a problem. But not all features are featurism.
Simple markup (like the original markdown, not its increasingly
featureful descendants) does make an important difference.

The real trick is knowing where to draw the line. Turing-completeness in
a document format is a fundamentally bad idea, but things like CSS that
allow for hidden content can be problematic in certain contexts and not
others. Like most things in security, "it depends".

I completely understand where you're coming from, I'm a vim-loving unix
beardie at heart too. But I don't think an insistence on text/plain
asceticism is tenable in 2018. HTML mail is unfortunately going to be
around for a long time. So mail clients (no more or less than web
browsers) have a responsibility to sandbox untrusted content. Plaintext
is a workaround, not a solution.

-- 
Andrew Gallagher

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 862 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/attachments/20180517/e79f3275/attachment.sig>