[imp] PGP bug? - compliance with RFCs 3156 & 1847

[Chris Hastie]

On Mon, 6 Jan 2003, Michael M Slusarz <slusarz at bigworm.colorado.edu> 
wrote
>| I also note that the decrypted section from Imp has LF line terminators
>| rather than CRLF. Given that this should decrypt to a plain text email,
>| this seems a strange choice.
>
>CRLF would be bad because on most systems CRLF translates to 2 breaks per
>line.  CRLF is only required for mail transport - not for local display or
>even handling on the local end.  LF seems to work fine on all systems when
>handling messages locally - even windows (which normally requires CRLF).

Talking of windows and being as usable as possible, whilst staring at 
the raw text of my two test messages I noted a feature of the Turnpike 
message that makes life slightly easier for users of Outlook Express, 
which doesn't handle PGP/MIME at all. It might be worth considering 
something similar, given the regrettable popularity of Outlook Express.

The "filename" attribute in the Content-Disposition header is set, using 
an appropriate extension. This makes the job of saving the 'attachment' 
and then opening with PGP slightly easier for the poor OE user:

|This is a PGP encrypted message sent according to RFC3156 [PGP/MIME]
|
|--=_Turnpike_jPaWiVArWeG+47nB=
|Content-Type: application/pgp-encrypted
|Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=version.txt
|
|Version: 1
|
|--=_Turnpike_jPaWiVArWeG+47nB=
|Content-Type: application/octet-stream
|Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=message.txt.asc
|
|-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
|Version: PGPsdk 2.0.5

The other tool that Turnpike has to help deal with OE's inadequacies is 
the ability to mark an entry in the address book as not handling MIME. 
In this case any PGP signed or encrypted messages to that recipient are 
sent in plain ASCII. Of course, OE does handle most types of MIME so it 
would be nice if TP could separate out MIME and PGP/MIME, but nothing's 
perfect, and you can always alter it manually whilst composing :)

-- 
Chris Hastie