Re: pine doesn't handle pgp signed messages (was Re: New uploads)

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

Craig Sanders writes ("pine doesn't handle pgp signed messages (was Re: New uploads)"):
> On Wed, 15 May 1996, Michael Meskes wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
...
> All i get is
>   [Part 1, Application/X-PGP-MESSAGE  4.7KB]
>   [Can not display this part. Use the "V" command to save in a file]

This is not a bug in Pine (wow!)  It's a bug in whatever program
Michael Meskes is using to generate is messages.  They say, in the
headers:
 Content-Type: application/X-pgp-message
 MIME-Version: 1.0
 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

The way Pine interprets this is that the message body is not a text
file; rather it is some weird application-specific gunk that neither
it nor the user should understand, and the best thing to do is
probably to save it to a file or something (if it can't find the
application).

This is an entirely correct interpretation of an entirely incorrect
header.

Michael: if you must do this please use at least
 Content-Type: text/x-pgp-message
which will tell programs that it's readable text.  Better would be
 Content-Type: text/plain

See the MIME RFCs for more details.

Ian.