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

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Chris Hastie <lists at oak-wood.co.uk>:

| 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

I'll take a look at this.

| 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.

Yuck.  Handling PGP messages in text/plain parts is not a good thing at 
all.  A main purpose of MIME is to be able to tell how to handle a message 
without analyzing its contents.  Thus, having to parse text/plain parts for 
PGP is hackish, at best.

IMP sends PGP encrypted messages in compliance (hopefully... we are getting 
there at least) with the available RFCs and that is all you can ask for (in 
my opinion).  If a user cares about PGP security, they should be using a 
mail agent that handles it properly.  This is OE's problem, not IMP's.

michael

______________________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at bigworm.colorado.edu]