Re: [tlug] Re: Draft: Quickie Guide to GPG

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2002 at 06:45:22PM +0200, Godwin Stewart wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 00:57:03 +0900, Jonathan Q <jq@example.com> squashed
> this out of the keyboard:
> 
> > 
> > I think it depends on the list.  On technical lists, you see
> > a lot more people doing it.  On lists populated by people
> > who wouldn't know a digital signature if it fell from the
> > sky and hit them, they'll probably think it's some virus or
> > something (that exact thing was related to me by another TLUGger).
> 
> They do indeed. Most of those poor souls using Lookout! Suxpress are
> completely lost because a signed mail shows up as a blank message with two
> attachments: one the text of the message and the other the GnuPG signature.
> Since they've been told that some attachments are dangerous, but don't know
> how to distinguish them from the harmless ones (because of that aggravating
> habit of Windows to hide filename extensions) they all think it's a virus
> and just delete the mail.

This ~might~ just be an issue with mutt.  I did a little superficial
googling on it yesterday, and it will definitely happen with mutt, seems
to not happen with Kmail (those were the only two that I saw mentioned
in my googling, and I only have mutt). I don't know about Sylpheed,
Mozilla or Netscape Mail, or pine.  

As for the issue with mutt, there's a patch that can be installed (I
didn't investigate it further, sorry, don't have the url) and then, IIRC
something to be added to .muttrc that will fix the issue. The mutt faq
mentions it but gives the answer tell your recepients to get a
non-broken email client.  It may also be fixed in mutt 1.5

Sorry for giving such superficial information--I'm not sure if it's
actually better than not saying anything at all--however, this was more
idle curiosity as most of my emails are sent to either tech friends or
tech lists.

-- 
Scott

PGP keyID EB3467D6 (1B48 077d 66F6 9DB0 FDC2  A409 FA54 D575 EB34 67D6 )
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6

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