User id's without person's name, only email

[Andrew Gallagher]

On 17/11/2021 14:40, Teemu Likonen wrote:
>   2. Second "address book" is my OpenPGP keyring. It groups persons'
>      names, their email and other key data. If many keys don't have name
>      in their user id it could be inconvenience. Computer programs can
>      find keys but often we need also manual "gpg -k" etc. Real names
>      help there.

It may sound like a nerdy quibble, but it's a fundamental weakness. 
Mapping a "Real Name" to an email address is a conceptually different 
thing from mapping an email address to a public key. Conflating the two 
introduces confusion about what exactly is being verified by the 
cryptographic toolchain. If an MUA's address book is not sufficiently 
user-friendly, then that's a user interface shortcoming that can't be 
fixed by introducing RFC-822 "Real Names", which were highly 
questionable long before email encryption was invented...

-- 
Andrew Gallagher

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