Re: [Evolution] Stop Evolution Automatically Asking to Decrypt Messages

[Ángel <angel 16bits net>]

On 2022-10-02 at 22:04 +0200, Jaroslaw Rafa wrote:
> I'm not suggesting you are making anything up.
> I'm suggesting that *Evolution is wrong* in trying to decrypt mail that
> isn't indicated as encrypted in its MIME type. It shouldn't do that. It
> *does* - according to what you write - but it *shouldn't*.

Except... inline-PGP is **older** than MIME.

MIME RFC 1341 (June 1992) is older than PGP Message Exchange Formats
RFC 1991 (August 1996), but the initial release of the original PGP
program was on June 1991.

Traditional PGP messages were just a plaintext email with a base64
block of encrypted data between lines "-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----" and
"-----END PGP MESSAGE-----"

Sadly they are even more interoperable than MIME nowadays, thanks to
email clients (and servers) not handling MiME properly. Worst case,
inline PGP can be easily copied into an external program to process it.
Processing a PGP/MIME message without MUA support is a lot more
complex.

evolution is doing the right thing here processing the PGP parts of the
email the old way, although I could see the case for a preference not
to do that, if people object to it.

Regards