Re: [Evolution] GPG message display

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

> I'm just now starting to play with GPG. When I sign a message, the
> recipient gets the email, with two attachments.

This is a bug in Outlook Express (or whatever other mailer the recipient
is using): it's not really two attachments, it's a body and one
attachment.

There's a bug in bugzilla that we ought to be putting names on the
attachments so OE will display those instead of calling them
"ATT001.DAT" or whatever. That should probably be bumped up in
priority...

> Is there any way that my message can be displayed by people
> not using Evolution/Linux/GPG (Which is to say 99% of my contact list,
> and most of the world)?

Short answer: not for 1.0.

Long answer: currently the message looks like:

  multipart/signed
    text/plain (or whatever, the body)
    application/pgp-signature

We could potentially instead do:

  multipart/alternative
    text/plain (or whatever, the body)
    multipart/signed
      text/plain (or whatever, the body *again*)
      application/pgp-signature

That is, put two copies of the body, and use a multipart/alternative so
that implementations that can't deal with multipart/signed can still
display just the plain text. (We could potentially even sign the first
part as inline pgp.)

There are two problems with this approach: first, obviously, it makes
the message twice as large as it needs to be. Second, it's possible
there are mailers that can deal with multipart/signed, but that *won't*
deal with it correctly inside a multipart/alternative. So this would
require testing.

-- Dan