On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Tim May wrote:

As you like to say, "Bullshit!"

I sometimes excerpt articles here. And to avoid the problems with HTML and "too much" and "too many headers," I usually have to spend time cutting and pasting from my screen to ensure that "What I See Is What I Send" (WISIWIS).

Exactly why should how you decide to spend your time in any way commit me to the same? Fundamentally socialist thinking. ____________________________________________________________________ Before a larger group can see the virtue of an idea, a smaller group must first understand it. "Stranger Suns" George Zebrowski The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

At 1:57 AM -0800 on 11/30/00, Tim May wrote:

This attitude summarizes why you are such a pest.

I'm not singling anybody out here at all on this, but he'd be even less of a pest, for me, anyway, if people just kill-filed him and stopped replying to him, or at least including his email address in their replies when they do. My Eudora filter file has *any* header with his email address in it going to the trash... Works for me, TYMMV. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

At 4:13 AM -0500 11/30/00, Riad S. Wahby wrote:

Attachment converted: G4 Tower HD:mutt-positron-16342-48 (TEXT/MSWD) (0000E850)

No, it _doesn't_ work. Clicking on your "mutt-positron" icon presented to me in Eudora caused Microsoft Word to launch on my system. Which gave me this message: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Tim May <tcmay@got.net> wrote:

(And then there's Riad Wahby, whose signed messages are unopenable by Eudora Pro. He is doing _something_ which makes my very-common mailer choke on his messages. Not my problem, as his messages then get deleted by me unread. Again, standard ASCII is the lingua franca which avoids this problem.)

Does this work now, Tim? It seems that Mutt insists on changing the content-type of messages when it signs them. My choices were multipart PGP/MIME (the one I used up until now, which seemed to disagree with Eudora Pro) or application/pgp (which broke nmh, the mailer most people here use). In any case, I modified Mutt to give the option of sending PGP signed messages as content-type text/plain, so this should work for you. In fact, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know if it does, and I'll assume that no response means my attempt at fixing this problem was unsuccessful. By the way, if anyone wants my patches (against Mutt 1.2.5), e-mail me privately and I'll send them to you. - -- Riad Wahby rsw@mit.edu MIT VI-2/A 2002 5105 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE6JhokiHor6RkxxqYRAly2AJ40KBa9IW7ZfhOpAiZVVH5rmmKAmgCggbjL FASj31M79LfoWmK58dtcw4k= =EadM -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- So, you might say, "it works." Nope. Problems: 1. I ain't gonna read messages that require me to launch my word processor. Mail shouldn't need external word processors or text editors. 2. Your message is encrusted with MIME junk, formatted text, etc. I suggest you drop all the signing crap. As Bram Cohen pointed out in his recent message about "nobody bothers with key revocations," the sad fact is that nobody cares about message signings, at least not at the level of lists like this. I may have signed one or two of the messages I've sent out in the last 8 years of list traffic. Has my lack of signings _meant_ my messages were assumed to be from someone else? 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.") ASCII is where it's at, at least for e-mail. P.S. Please don't run your messages through Choate's ssz node, either. His "CDR:" encrustations are also a fucking waste of bits. ("Re: CDR: Re: Sunders point on copyright infringement & HTML") I'm sending this through algebra.com, so Choate's CDR: may get stripped off. Thanks. (However, Riad, I probably won't make this effort to read your messages if you don't fix the main problems covered above.) --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.)

At 11:41 AM -0500 11/30/00, Riad S. Wahby wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

Tim May <tcmay@got.net> wrote:

...

No, it _doesn't_ work. Clicking on your "mutt-positron" icon presented to me in Eudora caused Microsoft Word to launch on my system. Which gave me this message:

Oh, how embarrassing. I forgot to make the Content-disposition: field inline instead of attachment. This was the source of the problem for Eudora.

I believe that is fixed now, and I've tested it with the copy of Eudora Pro I have sitting on my Windows box.

Yes, it looks fine now. I'll have to tell a friend of mine about this, as he's been telling me great how "mutt" is...in person, as his e-mail arrives unreadable to me! Now we just need to get Ernest Hua and Greg Newby to stop formatting their messages as they do. --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.)

On 11/30/00 at 1:46 AM, tcmay@got.net (Tim May) wrote:

So, you might say, "it works." Nope. Problems:

1. I ain't gonna read messages that require me to launch my word processor. Mail shouldn't need external word processors or text editors.

Mail programs need, at the very least, text editors, or it becomes difficult to compose. Or do you mean that word processors should be integrated into mail programs?

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.")

Luddite.

ASCII is where it's at, at least for e-mail.

The real issue is a common format. The fact that there is no common format more complex than ASCII is a tribute to the power of corporations over the power of standards - or, perhaps, if one had socialist tendencies, a tribute to the power of corporations over the power of the people - but I'm a fan of standards.

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.)

On Sun, Dec 10, 2000 at 07:04:18PM -0800, Tim May wrote: [...]

You're missing the point. Several people set their systems to provide their _entire_ messages as attachments. Riad Wahby acknowledged this, and fixed it. Others did not, so I started filtering them out.

Riad "fixed" his software by turning off RFC2015. An "attachment" is a part of a multipart MIME message that is not marked as "inline." Any part that *is* marked inline should be displayed inline by your MUA. If you'll look at the raw messages you're receiving, you'll see that the message bodies of RFC2015 messages are marked as text/plain with a content-disposition of inline, so they're not attachments. To say that people are sending their entire messages as attachments just because your MUA displays them that way, without accepting the possibility that your MUA is broken (it is if it can't understand content-disposition in other multipart types besides multipart/mixed), and claiming "Eurora Pro handles MIME fine" without even understanding yourself how MIME works, is disingenuous at best and a flat lie at worst. Please get your ass off the Internet until you can learn how to use it. Barring that, at least keep your mouth shut for a little while and open your eyes for a change. Given that about 30% of my messages every day come from you and contain very little content, I think you can put up with your MUA's broken display of proper MIME messages or get a new one, and stop giving the rest of us grief about it. (message not signed because it's intended for someone with a broken MUA; it's copied to the list lest someone actually start believing Tim's bullshit) -- Sean R. Lynch KG6CVV <seanl@literati.org> http://www.literati.org/users/seanl/ Key fingerprint = 540F 19F2 C416 847F 4832 B346 9AF3 E455 6E73 B691 GPG/PGP encrypted/signed email preferred.

The following is the entire readable content of the mail I just received: "Riad S. Wahby" wrote:

mutt-positron-16342-48Name: mutt-positron-16342-48 Type: Plain Text (text/plain)

I am trying to look at it from Netscape though... I can read it when I telnet into the email server & use the old Unix mail. Headers include:

Mr. May:

(And then there's Riad Wahby, whose signed messages are unopenable by Eudora Pro. He is doing _something_ which makes my very-common mailer choke on his messages. Not my problem, as his messages then get deleted by me unread. Again, standard ASCII is the lingua franca which avoids this problem.)

He's apparently using GPG, and he has been told about this. He doesn't seem to care. -- A quote from Petro's Archives: ********************************************** "Despite almost every experience I've ever had with federal authority, I keep imagining its competence." John Perry Barlow

At 01:41 AM 12/5/00 -0800, petro wrote:

Mr. May:

...

(And then there's Riad Wahby, whose signed messages are unopenable by Eudora Pro. He is doing _something_ which makes my very-common mailer choke on his messages. Not my problem, as his messages then get deleted by me unread. Again, standard ASCII is the lingua franca which avoids this problem.)

He's apparently using GPG, and he has been told about this. He doesn't seem to care.

You're incorrect. The problem isn't GPG, it's the Mutt mailer. Riad's using 1.2.5i, which almost did the right thing, and he went to the trouble of hacking the program to fix it. So now his messages are plaintext GPG or PGP in the message body, which is what they should be. I'm not sure if hacking was necessary - it looks like RGB on the linux-ipsec mailing list is getting the same effect, (though perhaps he also hacked the source.) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639