Re: [tlug] Followup on mutt and gpg

[Ulrich Plate <plate@example.com>]

On Tuesday 03 September 2002 13:00, Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> OK, question:  If, as Josh notes, this is not an "issue" but just Mutt
> being compliant with RFC 3156 and the problem is OE's for not being
> so, is the end result of this patch then to make Mutt stop being
> compliant with RFC 3156?

I hope not, but what I find interesting are two things:

1. KMail interprets messages *with* the patch as PGP-signed, and when I reply 
to Scott's message the first line referring to the signature, while your Mutt without the patch sends the GPG 
signature in a way that gets interpreted as an attachment of unknown MIME 
type (Attachment 1). 

2. More importantly (as a sign that there is confusion about where the 
signature starts and ends), when I reply to your mail, your key is kept in 
quoted lines:

> GPG key: DF12B4EF (5399 C834 3ABB C3AF 610C  5345 D5D6 E6EA DF12 B4EF)
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys  DF12B4EF

while those lines are effectively suppressed when I answer to Scott.

I really don't have much of a clue about all this, but I've checked my 
backlog, and I've found the same "issue" outside of Mutt, namely TLUGers 
using Ximian Evolution, Sylpheed and VM produce the same kind of behaviour in 
OE (and possibly KMail, but I don't have the same backlog here).  It also 
happens with signed mails from people using Oort Gnus.

I'm prepared to shut up and blame it on MS like everybody else, but it 
remains one hell of a problem if you consider OE the most wide-spread mailer 
around. Honestly, I don't think anybody can afford to shun half the net 
population just because they're not RFC compliant. I mean, I know what's 
going on only because the BSD dudes at the headquarter of my company educated 
me months ago, but most OE users are simply not in the picture and will 
probably panic and delete your mails as soon as they arrive. And certainly 
not know anyone who could explain what an RFC is.

I'll try and get GPG running on all my machines until the weekend, including 
W2K and XP, and will report my experiences. Maybe the attachment issue 
disappears when the OE PGP plugin is present? Stay tuned. :-)

Cheers
Ulrich Plate