Re: Oops, forgot...
On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 10:37:17AM -0700, Royce Bell wrote:
> Uh...is there a reason why several posts to the list (usually from specific
> individuals), come with attached text files. I'm not in the habit of
> opening ANY attachment, not even from friends I know well, and this is quite
> disconcerting.
This may be because of one little line I saw in the headers of your
message:
>>> X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
Outlook Express does not understand the multipart/signed mime
convention, and so instead of realizing that someone is sending a
compliant pgp signed message, along with the signature (both as
attachments with a directive to display them inline), it just shows you
an empty message with two attachments, one text and one something else
(the signature).
There are a few solutions. Send your customer feedback to M$ that you
would like an email client that conforms to the standard (I think it's
RFC 1847). Use Outlook instead of Outlook Express. Use a non-M$ mail
client (I'm pretty sure Eudora does the Right Thing(tm)).
In most places, this won't be a problem because nobody seems to care
about security over email, and so people, for the most part, do not sign
messages. And when they do, they use a deprecated method to conform
with the M$ world. If we begin to see a larger proliferation of email
encryption beyond a few open source geeks, either the standard will be
adopted to conform to M$ or they might produce a compliant client.
-ben
p.s. This message is not signed so that Royce may read it without fear
of opening an attachment.
--
Ben Hartshorne ...Discarding smoothly, as we disembark,
ben@hartshorne.net All thoughts that held us wiser for a moment
ben.hartshorne.net Up there, alone, in the impartial dark. -M. Oliver
My PGP key is at /pgp.txt. Please encrypt all communications.
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