on Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 01:50:26AM +0100, Pigeon (jah.pigeon@ukonline.co.uk) wrote: > On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 05:48:42PM -0400, ScruLoose wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 01:18:18PM -0700, Alan Connor wrote: > > > 2) They are a an extreme violation of netiquette > > > > I don't know where you've been learning your netiquette. PGP-signed > > messages have been widely regarded as acceptable (if not preferable) > > for *at least* the past decade. > > I'm on a yahoo mailing list that automatically strips PGP signatures > from posts. I consider that a genuine breach of netiquette. It's a specific violation of RFC 2015. Among the reasons for supporting a MIME-encoded PGP signature and payload is so that mail transports (and archives) will _treat the content as immutable_. This should be reported as a bug to Yahoo. Then again, there are other problems I've got with Yahoo lists/groups which basically wall them off from me. Try reading a Yahoo group w/o cookies sometime. > > > 4) They make posts hard to read and ugly. > > > > Only if you're reading them on a badly broken client (or User-Agent if > > you prefer the term). > > eg. Outlook Express... More to the point: the RFC 2015 standard (as opposed to the S-MIME signature standard) calls for a message body which is otherwise unimpeded, and a signature which itself is plain text, meaning that if a mailer without RFC 2015 support does _the right thing_ and doesn't mess with the message, both are available. As cleartext. And for subsequent validation. Microsoft naturally "embraces and extends" this standard in a way that breaks utility. > > A properly designed program *even if it doesn't know PGP* will just > > display the message text, leaving the signature alone it its own > > attachment. > > And a decent client that does understand PGP will do the same if you > tell it to, so you don't have to be encumbered with it if you don't > want to be. Alan's complaints here are very curious as his headers indicate he uses mutt. Which was designed as a reference RFC 2015 implementation by Michael R. Elkins, specifically to provide PGP signature and encryption support. Similarly, Alan's mail configuration breaks threads for some reason. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Support the EFF, they support you: http://www.eff.org/
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