[imp] PGP/MIME vs OpenPGP

[Harakiri]

--- On Fri, 11/14/08, A <admin at panamawebmasters.com> wrote:

> From: A <admin at panamawebmasters.com>

> I do not understand the difference between PGP/MIME and
> OpenPGP; Where can I get specific details on the
> differences?

Download Thunderbird + Enigmail - add an attachment to your message, try to encrypt the message - you will get a dialog how you would like to encrypt the message.

Basically, PGP/MIME is like S/MIME the whole message block gets encrypted (excluding headers) in one process - the result is a multipart message with one text body (info about pgp/mime encryption) and the encrypted message itself as an attachment.

PGP "Classic" or Partitioned format is, that you encrypt each bodypart and each attachment separate, meaning if you add 3 attachments - you get 3 encrypted attachments, if you have only a text message - only a text block is encrypted. The only advantage of this is, that you can fetch headers of all body parts of a message (like hushmail probably do) - and decrypt on the fly in the client - when you use pgp/mime - you cannot know how many and which attachment are encrypted.