Re: [Evolution] Evolution/GPG

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> People tell me that they can't open the attachment (my signature comes
> attached to my mails). I know it's not an Evo problem, but what advice
> can I give them? 
You don't open the attachment - the PGP signature is meaningless
without the message it's attached to: the point of the signature is
that the recipient can verify that the message is identical to when it
was signed, and that it came from you because it is signed with your
key - only your key *and* the original message can produce that PGP
signature.  If you open just the attachment, there is no message body
to verify the signature.

It really depends on what mail program they are using - Evo produces
PGP/MIME multipart/signed messages and in general they are processed as
a whole by the mail program to verify the signature automatically.
Verifying the signature manually is quite time consuming - you need to
save the signature and text parts of the message separately then use
gpg to verify the signature with something like

  gpg --verify signature.asc message.txt

Don't be tempted to cut and paste the message parts because the signed
version of the message is the one with the quoted printable entities in
it, so the cut and pasted version will be wrong.

To be honest most modern mail programs should be able to cope with
PGP/MIME - RFC2015 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2015.txt (which is the
relevant standard) was introduced in 1996 - so it's really just a
matter of the recipient working out what to do.

P.