Signatures and MIME Attachments Getting Out of Hand

[Tim May]

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.)