Re: [Evolution-hackers] Inline PGP encoding in Enigmail

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com>]

On 07/03/2010 08:28 PM, Kip Warner wrote:
> Greetings ladies and gentlemen. There is a thread currently going over
> in the Enigmail mailing list that draws on Evolution's design and the
> choice made to use PGP/MIME encoding, as opposed to inline, for
> sending. 
>
> http://mozdev.org/pipermail/enigmail/2010-July/thread.html
>
> Subject: [Enigmail] Request for PGP/MIME as default setting
>
> It may be of interest to those knowledgeable.
>   

I can't believe I still remembered the bug# for this... but, the feature
request for sending inline-pgp was:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217541

Anyways, having read the thread on the Enigma list - I have no idea what
Robert J. Hansen is talking about wrt to any IRC discussions with some
PGP Security group (there was never any such discussion, on IRC or
anywhere as far as I can remember). Also, there were never any technical
limitations for sending inline-pgp (there were some problems initially
with Camel for /verifying/ pgp signatures, but those got worked out as
had to be done for PGP/MIME anyway).

As far as I remember, the reason we never bothered to implement
inline-pgp sending support was more because it was plagued with
compatibility problems with the various clients than anything else and
really was only ever meant to work with plain-text message /bodies/ (one
client or another would pgp sign or encrypt individual attachments too,
but most clients weren't able to actually handle that). For example,
Outlook's inline-pgp plugin would basically screen-scrape the message
body after the user finished composing his/her message, pipe it to pgp,
then pipe the signed (or encrypted) output back to the composer, which
would then re-HTMLify it (have fun dealing with that!).

I would imagine implementing support for sending inline-pgp messages
wouldn't be terribly difficult to implement these days if one were so
inclined. I'm not sure anyone actually cares though, seeing as how it
seems the last request for this feature was from 2004(?).

I also seem to remember the Mutt author telling me he was making Mutt
default to PGP/MIME quite a few years ago (2002 or 2003 I think), and
Mutt users are pretty hard-core so I figured inline-pgp was dead ;-)

Jeff