The subject line leakage problem

All,

        One of the ongoing problems with people using PGP is that people put
confidential information in the mail subject lines, eg:

Subject: Proposed purchase of Excite(_at_)Home
Subject: Your STD test results
Subject: Planned head count reduction

        etc.

So over the years there have been plenty of fixes involving CMS encrypted
attributes etc. which gets into the rat hole of what other headers to add
in.

So instead of that how about the following fix:

1) A Best Current Practice Draft that says
2) Clients SHOULD offer users the option of replacing the subject line on
confidential messages and carrying the subject as the first line in the body
of the message.


So the above message would become

Subject: Confidential
Subject: Confidential
Subject: Confidential

And when opened we get something like:

Subject: Confidential

Subject: Proposed purchase of Excite(_at_)Home

Alice, 
        Yadda Yadda Yadda ....


        So, no need for any modification of existing specs, complete
backwards interop and the bug in the spec gets fixed.

                Phill

Phillip Hallam-Baker FBCS C.Eng.
Principal Scientist
VeriSign Inc.
pbaker(_at_)verisign(_dot_)com
781 245 6996 x227

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