Re: [Evolution] OpenPGP/GPG inline message support

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 11:56, Gregor Hlawacek wrote:
> Am Sa, den 15.05.2004 schrieb Jeffrey Stedfast um 1:09:
> > On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 16:06 -0500, Brian G. Peterson wrote:
> > > I'm writing to inquire after the status of inline OpenPGP support in
> > > Evolution.  Google and the archive for this list (and my current
> > > experience with Evolution) seem to indicate that inline OpenPGP messages
> > > are *still* not supported.
> > >
> > > inline support is required for full OpenPGP standards compliance
> > .............
> > End Of Thread (since nothing useful can come out of further discussion
> > of this topic)
>
> I think the last sentence is a little bit rude.

all past threads that had anything to do with inline pgp turned into a
flame wars and I'd rather not have to wade thru yet another...

>  No matter some one was
> asking for a feature (that I think would be nice) and at least has read
> a lot of rfc which is not easy especially when the topic is mime and
> pgp. I know that other (M$ and Linux) mailer have this option and I
> think it would be nice. It is okay to decide to not implement this but
> it should be okay to talk about it. 

the thing is, what is there to talk about really? a feature request has
already been filed. some contributor was working on it but has seemingly
disappeared (this is like the 4th or 5th time this has happened).

> No matter who does the actuall encryption or singing my mailer should at
> least give an interface to all the usefull features of pgp.

that's basically impossible.

>  However pgp
> signing is working and I am using it. I guess that the signature evo
> creates with the help of pgp is only for the text not for attachements
> (kmail can do both)?

no, Evolution signs the toplevel MIME part which means that the
attachments are included in the signature.

you can't do this with "inline pgp". in fact, this is one of the many
problems with inline pgp, you can't sign attachments. Some mailers
(Outlook and/or PGPMail?) will do dumb shit like signing or encrypting
the content and still setting the Content-Type to whatever the
attachment mime-type was. This totally breaks stuff for mailers, even
ones that purport to support inline-pgp because most inline-pgp mailers
only support inline-pgp in text/plain parts. They don't even think to
look in image/jpeg or whatever else parts (which some inline-pgp mailer
or another actually does - I know because we got a bug report about it a
few years back).

totally pisses me off because once you clearsign or encrypt the content,
it's no longer the same mime-type, but broken mailers that send
inline-pgp do it all the bloody time.

Content-Type is meant to tell MUA's what the content is so that they can
display it properly.

If your MUA doesn't smoke from the same crackpipe that the email
author's mailer smokes from, then your mailer won't be able to handle
it.

The whole bloody purpose of MIME is to avoid this issue!!!

</rant>

Jeff