Re: First general purpose unmoderated newsgroup for Debian
Thomas Stivers <stivers_t@tomass.dyndns.org> writes:
> On Sat, Sep 04 2004 at 05:54:24PM -0700, Paul Johnson wrote:
>> <#secure method=pgp mode=sign>
>
> Just out of curiosity what is the purpose of the line above? I have seen
> it only on Paul's messages and it seems unnecessary.
It's an mml (MIME Meta Language) tag. Paul uses Gnus, which in turn
uses Emacs' Message mode to compose messages. mml is a tagging
language mecanism used by Emacs' message mode to convey
meta-information internally to the MUA, mainly to compose mime
messages. AFAICT, it shouldn't actually appear in the resulting
message, instead it should be rewritten as some MIME stanzas - or, in
this case, as an inline PGP sig I guess.
To give you an idea of what use they are, if I want to encrypt a
message I add an mml tag to it. The message only actually gets
encrypted at the time I send it. This way, I can edit it without
breaking the crypto. You can see it as a way to say "hey, MUA -
remember to encrypt just before sending - but not now, it is too
early". Signing, encrypting, attaching some file work this way in
Gnus world.
So what you see in Paul's messages looks to me like a leftover of a
Gnus missetup[1].
Paul: You might want to investigate that. There are two issues that
I can see: First, this mml tag shouldn't end up in the final message,
should it ? Second, ISTR that PGP/MIME is recommended over inline
PGP. The reason is that mail systems can handle reliably &
automatically PGP/MIME signatures (handling being verify, strip,
whatever). OTOH, they cannot with inline PGP.
Regards,
Footnotes:
[1] Or, maybe, just maybe, some bug in Gnus. But as we all know, this
fine piece of software is bug free, isn't it ?[2]
[2] But then, with Gnus the difference between core Gnus code and
personal configuration sometimes dims. That's half the fun with
this MUA.
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