At 2:27 PM -0500 12/3/00, Adam Langley wrote:

Attachment converted: G4 Tower HD:UK Govt seeks to capture and st (MiME/CSOm) (0000F86A)

This is really getting out of hand! Attempting to open this message, by clicking on the attachment, bombs/crashes my Eudora Pro 5.0.1 mailer. Repeatedly--I tried 4 times. Maybe it's something that Eudora Pro, a very common mailer, is not doing properly. Maybe I failed to set the DigitalBassomaticMime preferences properly. Maybe I didn't installed SHADecoder in the right place. I don't have the time to investigate each one of the new and weird bomb syndromes each time it happens. What I know is that an increasing fraction of the (ironically _decreasing_ total number of) messages to Cypherpunks are in "weird" formats: -- MIME -- attachments, sometimes "inline," sometimes not -- tiny fonts, colored fonts, other MIME cruft -- signatures as _attachments_ Folks, I urge you to test your new signing policies with a variety of mailers. And to think carefully about whether the signatures are worth the hassle. (My view, stated many times over the years, is that routine signing of everyday messages is a waste of time for everyone. For lots of reasons.) Remember, people will be reading ASCII mail on a variety of systems: Windows, NT, DOS, VT100, Mac, Amiga, Minitel, PDAs, etc.. And with a variety of mailers: Outlook, Eudora, mutt, pine, NextStep mail, etc. And they may have a variety of crypto tools either installed, linked to their mailers, or available only by launching the app: PGP of varying vintages, GPG, SMIME, etc. If messages are signed, great care should be taken to ensure that the signatures do not in any way interfere with the normal presentation of good old ASCII text, the lingua franca of the online world. Absent this, I'm just going to have to start trashing without reading the messages from folks whose messages bomb my mail program. I'm sure they won't mind. --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 7:16 PM -0500 12/3/00, Riad S. Wahby wrote:

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

Tim May wrote:

...

If messages are signed, great care should be taken to ensure that the signatures do not in any way interfere with the normal presentation of good old ASCII text, the lingua franca of the online world.

The problem you're seeing arises because your mailer and others like it (Outlook, etc.) do not follow the PGP/MIME standard (RFC 2015, Oct. 1996), which calls for the support of the content-types application/pgp-encrypted, application/pgp-signature, and application/pgp-keys. Unfortunately, many of us use mailers that make some attempt at supporting standards, and in the end you just can't read our mail.

You are so right. It is pointless for me to argue that you folks should stick to ASCII. Therefore, it is best that I simply take the 5-6 recent posters involved and filter them out of my incoming mail. As each new MIMEoid appears, I'll add him to the filter file. Bye! --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.)

Both of you make reasonable points. (I read cypherpunks exclusively with mutt, which does follow the standards, perhaps even fanatically.) But there seems to be little benefit to (a) signing messages, though this admittedly a personal issue and (b) using MIME types when some mailreaders will not support them. Heck, even leaving aside the Eudora problem, MIME attachments would pose problems if I want to use /bin/mail in a pinch. -Declan (living in the '80s) On Sun, Dec 03, 2000 at 09:26:29PM -0500, Riad S. Wahby wrote:

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

Tim May wrote:

...

It is pointless for me to argue that you folks should stick to ASCII.

I agree that people should stick to ASCII, which is why my messages are completely made up of plain ASCII text. I use the content-type fields only to make it easier for mailers that support MIME to handle my messages; in this case, it's text/plain, so everyone should display it the same. Presumably that includes your mail client, as I've tested my mutt patch against Eudora Pro, and it seems to work fine. If it doesn't, please let me know how it misbehaves so that I can fix it.

- -- 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

iD8DBQE6KwC1iHor6RkxxqYRAmThAKDGHjGIvMaHBhdwTaFBqFmNTcAjcACg3GDh GqlAWUPXbVh83pFuvnVjtM0= =0Wbu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Wahby (WABI?) wrote:

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

Tim May wrote:

...

If messages are signed, great care should be taken to ensure that the signatures do not in any way interfere with the normal presentation of good old ASCII text, the lingua franca of the online world.

The problem you're seeing arises because your mailer and others like it (Outlook, etc.) do not follow the PGP/MIME standard (RFC 2015, Oct. 1996), which calls for the support of the content-types application/pgp-encrypted, application/pgp-signature, and application/pgp-keys. Unfortunately, many of us use mailers that make some attempt at supporting standards, and in the end you just can't read our mail.

Langley's pgp message has the following headers: Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="FCuugMFkClbJLl1L" Yours comes through as Content-Type: text/plain His activates the PGP plugin on my installation of Eudora.

There is at least some blame to be placed with the people who came up with these standards. A lack of backwards-compatibility is almost always a recipie for disaster, especially because of the sheer number of mail programs available. Fortunately, I'm using an open-source mail client, so I'm not stuck with unsupported standards. :-)

Of course, it doesn't play well with others, but that's common. -- 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