[dev] PGP Mime implementation

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Eric Sheesley <esheesle at bcpl.net>:

> I downloaded and began running the cvs version of horde/imp about a week
> ago.  Great product.  Love that it can do encryption.  The only problem I
> have run into is that few if any services or mail clients that are widely
> used support PGP/MIME.  I personally use Outlook w/ PGP from home(which
> should fully support just about any type of PGP) and many of my friends use
> hushmail which touts being 100% Openpgp compliant.  Was there a reason that
> PGP/MIME was chosen over the standard way of just having the contents as
> part of the message?(not a separate mime part)

Sure.  Because the way we do it is RFC compliant.  The other way is not.  Not
only are there absolutely no standards as to exactly how you are supposed to
send a PGP message in a text block, but this undermines the whole purpose of
the MIME system in the first place - multipart/signed indicates that there is
encrypted data in the message; text/plain indicates there is plaintext.
text/plain does not mean that the receiving mail agent should scan the body in
the hopes that it finds some PGP data in there (although we allow a user to do
this to workaround the old clients out there).

> Does anyone know what I
> would need to modify to make it work that way?

Seriously hack the code.

As for your claim that this is not the "standard" way of doing things, 
I believe
that to be incorrect.  All sorts of freely available, powerful mail clients
support PGP MIME just fine (Mutt, Thunderbird and Evolution are three 
that come
to mind off the top of my head).

michael

_______________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at curecanti.org]