--On Monday, 13 October, 2014 20:25 -0400 Scott Kitterman
<scott(_at_)kitterman(_dot_)com> wrote:
I went back and looked at a random sampling of the PGP
encrypted mails I've received over the last couple of years.
100% of them were multipart:
Content-Type: multipart/encrypted;
protocol="application/pgp-encrypted";
Interesting. We must be seeing different communities. Very
subjectively, I'd guess that about half of the PGP encrypted
(whether signed or not) and almost all of the
signed-but-not-encrypted messages are in ASCII armored form, not
multipart/encrypted. I have speculations about the reasons for
both, but the bottom line in:
-- multipart/encrypted isn't as successful as we had expected
-- The ASCII armor format which, IIR, predates
multipart/encryption and may make up part of the reason for
Ned's observation that the PGP community didn't like MIME very
much, is still alive an well.
Ned is obviously correct -- ASCII armor doesn't do a thing for
complex, structured, messages while multipart/encrypted was
designed to handle them and does. But that fact has never
eliminated the cases in which the message payload is a singe,
text-style, body part and standalone PGP processors can created
a signed and/or encrypted block of text that is then pasted into
(really instead of) a conventional message.
john