ietf-openpgp
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Re: Standardizing inline PGP for e-mail?

2003-01-22 12:12:14

I'm not very clueful about MIME and I18N, so I post with some
trepidation.

Given Ned's comments, how about "text/openpgp"?
This would specify the type of the content in the type, and whether
the contents are a key block, encrypted message, signed message, or
clearsigned message is already in the contents.

It sounds like for messages which are in ASCII, the conversion to
UTF-8 is a no-op.

To me, part of the point of backwards compatibility is ensuring that
an MUA can deal with incoming messages of the form that have been
commonly sent for years.  emacs/mh-e/mailcrypt, for example, does not
insert any MIME headers at all.  So, it seems an MUA has to scan a
text/plain or a non-MIME message for PGP headers, and process it if
they are present.  Having messages tagged as the standard would make
it reasonable to make this either an explicit user command to process
untagged messages or an option that could be defaulted to off.

I suppose it all comes down to one's opinion on whether it is
reasonable to send PGP with a non-MIME-aware MUA.  I do this all the
time, and think it is a reasonable thing to want to do.  (Opinions on
a mh-e/RMAIL style interface that does PGP/MIME nicely are welcome
offlist.)

        Greg Troxel <gdt(_at_)ir(_dot_)bbn(_dot_)com>