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Re: Secure receipts

1997-10-16 12:49:14
Ian Brown writes:

Something which has been mentioned over the last few days, which I also
think would be enormously useful, is the possibility to do secure
message receipts. When an OpenPGP client succesfully decrypts a message
which has a flag set requesting a message receipt, it could mail back a
secure receipt packet which would look something like the following
(this is just a very first draft, based on the current Signature
packet):

I'd suggest that rather than use any sort of binary encoding, this could be
better handled at the MIME level.  Particularly if you are bringing in
material which is outside the body of the message, like message-ids, it
is going to be very client-dependent how to get to that information.

RFC 1894 describes a message-delivery-status MIME message format which
is similar to what you are asking for.  If it were encapsulated in a
PGPMIME signed message then you would have the authentication security
that you want.  The RFC is more oriented towards the MTA rather than MUA
level, so it would indicate that the message had arrived in the user's
mailbox, but not whether he had read it.  However the 1894 syntax could
be extended to cover that case as well.

Hal Finney
hal(_at_)pgp(_dot_)com
hal(_at_)rain(_dot_)org

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