You're quite right, and I would extend it to say that any design that
relies on MUAs to do anything consistently is in trouble.
That level of generalization can't be correct. Otherwise basic
interoperability at the MUA level could not exist.
My MSA contains quite a lot of code to fix the mechanical mistakes in the
messages that MUAs inflict on it. MUAs do reasonably well at the things
that people really depend on, e.g. putting the right strings in the From:
and Subject: lines, and the right strings in the submitted envelope.
These have to work, since if they didn't people couldn't send mail, and
the MUA vendors would get complaints.
From there, it goes downhill fairly rapidly. Consider, for example, the
wide range of garbage purporting to be HTML that they create for formatted
mail. Validating S/MIME signatures appears to fall in the range of
features that are nice to have, but not a big deal if they don't really
work.
R's,
John
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
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