On Sun, Dec 10, 2000 at 04:46:05PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
Fact is, PGP and SMIME went the _wrong_ direction when message signings started to require RTF, MIME, HTML, etc. (I realize these are not all the same thing. The real issue is "non-ASCII.")
Apparently, Eudora didn't manage to implement MIME properly within 7 years. That is unfortunate, but MIME is the right direction nevertheless. A MIME-compliant mail reader without PGP support would just display the message without the signature, and possible add a note that there was a signature that could not be verified (or that an attachment could not be displayed). That is much better than PGP "ASCII armor" where several lines of meaningless characters are displayed to the user. (It is generally not a good idea to use signatures and HTML on mailing lists, but that is an entirely different issue.)