Has a proposal been made to officially adopt a header field in standard Internet mail messages that would essentially include security signature information? Something like: X-Security-Type: PGP 1.0 X-Security-Code: asdui&Dh1daOFajsFNOA...etc. These generic field names would allow for various types of security methods. Most important, would make it a lot easier for smart e-mail systems to recognize secured e-mail, with the option of allowing the user to filter out such fields when reading text. The current scheme of having to "frame" the content (plain text) and add the PGP signature is distracting. This won't fly for several reasons. First, X- implies a non-standard header. Second, in the Internet world PEM is on the standards track, and it uses a PGP-like encapsulation. (More precisely, many facets of the PGP appearance were taken from PEM.) PEM does provide for various security mechanisms, I should note, not just the current RSA+DES. Finally, the scheme which you label ``distracting'' (and I agree) was adopted because there's simply too much information to put into headers in any comprehensible fashion, and to really do the job properly requires an encoded (and hence unreadable) plaintext of the message, independent of the encryption or signature algorithms. (These folks worried, and rightly so, about character sets, gateways that would add or drop trailing blanks or tabs, etc.)