Signed, anonymous...(was Re: Getting Bush...)

[Meyer Wolfsheim]

On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, Karsten M. Self wrote:

> I suppose this has also been discussed, but if anyone has a favorite
> compelling argument I'd be interested in seeing it.

Check the archives for such discussions.

> Several Web archives include signatures.  Checking, e.g.:, debian-user,
> I found I couldn't validate my own posts.  However, archives in mbox
> format with full text of mail as received should work.

Most archives don't work that way. You will not be able to verify PGP/MIME
messages in the majority of web archives available, nor will you be able
to verify them with the majority of email clients available.

> I can think of several compelling arguments for supporting signed list
> messages, should the sender wish to sign.

Certainly. However, those people should use RFC 2440 signed messages, not
2015.

This was discussed extensively on this list sometime in the past year, so
I was not going to go into it again. If you're still confused on the
topic, you can read the past discussions. For instance:

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.

Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com> wrote:
> 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.

petro <petro at bounty.org> wrote:
> Of course, [Mutt] doesn't play well with others, but that's common.

You can read the entire tread here:
http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.2000.12.04-2000.12.10/msg00006.html

(I found it in about 30 seconds with google.)

> [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

Snicker.


-MW-