4 Oct
2000
4 Oct
'00
4:43 a.m.
Steve Furlong wrote:
Why not just read the first 20 bytes of the body? If 90% or more aren't printable ASCII assume the message is encrypted.
Or compressed, or a bitmap, or executable code, or coming from an EBCDIC machine, or using a weird variant of Unicode that you weren't previously aware of, or audio, or video... Without a header at the front saying "This is PGP version such-and-such" (or whatever other algorithm is used) there is no way to tell well-encrypted text from some sorts of compressed files. That is part of the point - if the encrypted text was obviously different from random data the difference could contain clues. Ken