Subject: Re: OpenPGP vs. OpenPGP/MIME

From: Marc Mutz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 08:28:59 +0100

On Friday 25 January 2002 01:48, Jon Callas wrote:
> At 11:46 PM +0100 1/24/02, Thomas Roessler wrote:
> >On 2002-01-24 23:38:13 +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> >>I agree with Jon's opinion.  PGP/MIME interoperability is bad.
> >
> >Really?  It certainly won't get worse than MIME interoperability in
> >general.
>
> That is precisely my point. It's not a PGP problem, it's a MIME
> problem. Which means that PGP/MIME is a good thing in theory, but not
> in practice. Once MIME interoperability starts working, more power to
> it.
<snip>

So we should prolong the lifespan of a broken design (just think i18n) 
just because the mime interop of some widely deployed mail software is 
less than optimal?
What about encouraging people to implement PGP/MIME and see its wide 
deployment force others to fix their stuff?

Just the opinion of someone implementing of a MIME parser: Plain pgp is 
ugly as hell, PGP/MIME resp. rfc1847 sucks much less.

Marc

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From: Carl Ellison <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 21:04:15 -0800

Does anyone know why PGP/MIME messages from Mutt consistently crash
Eudora while those from Evolution or exmh don’t?

One would think that a good standard wouldn’t allow any such
variability.

 - Carl

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Carl M. Ellison         [email-masked]     http://world.std.com/~cme |
|    PGP: 08FF BA05 599B 49D2  23C6 6FFD 36BA D342                 |
+--Officer, officer, arrest that man. He's whistling a dirty song.-+

---

From: Will Price <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 21:24:54 -0800

Yes, it is because you're using an old version of PGP (6.5.8) which
was released in June of 1999 (in other words, many years ago).

In recent versions, we accomodated the Mutt way of encoding PGP/MIME.
I don't recall exactly which version that went into. The current
Eudora plugin version is 7.1.1 which is of course part of PGP 7.1.1.

> One would think that a good standard wouldn’t allow any such

- -- Will

Will Price, Director of Engineering
PGP Security, Inc.
a division of Network Associates, Inc.

---

From: Thomas Roessler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 10:45:11 +0100

On 2002-02-12 21:04:15 -0800, Carl Ellison wrote:

>One would think that a good standard wouldn't allow any such 
>variability.

One would also think that a good implementation won't crash when 
encountering standard compliant messages (it shouldn't even crash 
when receiving junk).

On 2002-02-12 21:24:54 -0800, Will Price wrote:

>In recent versions, we accomodated the Mutt way of encoding 
>PGP/MIME. I don't recall exactly which version that went into. The 
>current Eudora plugin version is 7.1.1 which is of course part of 
>PGP 7.1.1.

May I ask what particular detail of mutt's way of encoding had to be 
specifically accomodated?

I'm asking because _if_ mutt is violating the standard, this would 
be something I'd really like to see fixed.  (Yes, I am aware that 
earlier versions of mutt have possibly generated wrong micalg 
parameters, unless users paid attention.  This particular problem 
has, however, been fixed quite thoroughly.)

Writing with the "current mutt maintainer" hat,
-- 
Thomas Roessler                        <[email-masked]>