Signatures and MIME Attachments Getting Out of Hand

[petro]

Wahby (WABI?) wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>Tim May <tcmay at got.net> 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.
-- 
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