At 5:03 PM 12/12/94, Andrew Brown wrote:

but is a remailer (or pgp) smart enough to take the output from checking a signature and run pgp over it again? is it going to know to take something and pass it through pgp until pgp can't do anything with it any more? i think that's the problem that jrochkin was addressing. he has a pgp encrypted message and then signs it and then wants to mail it to a remailer so that the remailer can decrypt the message but it won't ecause the encryption is nested...

wasn't that it?

Well, no, not really. My problem was that a user would send me their public key, inside of a signed message, and the "BEGIN PUBLIC KEY" stuff would have the "- " on it. Which means that before I can add it to my keyring, I've got to edit out the extra "- "s, and then save it in a file, and then pass it through PGP, instead of just passing the original message though PGP, or using the Mac "copy" command on a part of the message and sending that through PGP. Or someone sends me an encrypted address block inside a signed message, and I've got to do the same before I can use it. I now understand why PGP does what it does, but it's still a pain. Perhaps the ideal mail reading program would run my incoming mail through PGP before I even saw it, so I wouldn't have this problem. Well, actually not. My ideal mail reader would check the signatures before I saw them, but would also leave them intact on the message, so I could re-check them myself manually if I wanted. Oh well. It's not a limitation on functionality of any kind, just on convenience.