su. den 07. 02. 2016 klokka 21.58 (+0000) skreiv Pete Biggs:
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.
That's very educational, an adequate answer, to the point and very helpful indeed! I really needed this theoretical understanding of the whole point by signing. So far, i.e. before Evolution, I did all this in the terminal, gpg --clearsign file.txt or gpg -r ID -aes file.txt. That is probably why I expected my letters to look the same, also when using Evolution. It puzzles me though, that after converting from SHA-1 to SHA-256, Evolution still uses SHA-1. What can be the reason for that, you think? Great answer, a huge step in my theoretical understanding. SRW
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part