Actually Hal make a valid point that appears to need emphasis: in a
recursive message such as would exist in a PGP encrypted file which was
then MIME encoded, how would the recipient know what it was ?
Today, I can recognize PGP files for me by the "h" as the first character
just as the typical UUENCODE first character is "M". It would seem to
make sense that part of the standard be to bring forth to the top level
each of the successive levels of encoding so that the recipient can tell
what has been received without unbundling.
Note that this is not something that is specific to PGP and AsciiArmouring
but rather pertinant to any recursive mechanism.
Warmly,
Padgett
ps of course maybe this is not a bug but a feature to make automatic
universal decoders to spend as much time on each message as possible 8*)