Subject: Re: Dash-escaping and the Usenet sig convention

From: Ian Bell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 11:42:00 +0000

On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, Rodney Thayer <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>I agree with Jon on this.  Insisting that the world suddenly change
>to MIME is not helping the adoption of PGP, in fact, it makes it harder
>as people tend to delete these nasty MIME messages.  It's even worse with
>windows, as the (almost unreadable) "...ems" message

The ".ems" message is a function of the particular client you are using,
not of Windows clients in general.

> looks annoyingly
>similar to a (usually unreadable) SMIME message.  

PGP/MIME signed messages should always be readable by MIME-compliant
clients - the checking of the signature is another matter.

>I think we should be be building systems that INCREASE the usage of
>this technology, not decrease it.

The usage of PGP in the general email-using population will probably
only increase after PGP/MIME becomes much more widely supported. The
ordinary user is going to be very bemused by being told they should use
PGP, only to find that problems arise if they send attachments, use 8bit
characters, forward messages etc.

-- 
Ian Bell                                           T U R N P I K E

---

From: Dave Del Torto <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 16:25:16 -0800

At 12:42 pm -0800 2000-12-30, Rodney Thayer wrote:
>At 08:06 AM 12/12/00 -0800, Jon Callas wrote:
>  >In our last episode ("Re: Dash-escaping and the Usenet sig convention",
>  >shown on 12/12/00), Werner Koch said:
>  >
>  > >The preferred way to encapsulate OpenPGP messages in mail is by using
>  > >MIME as defined in RFC2015.  No need for the old fashioned cleartext
>  > >signing.
>  >
>  >I disagree completely. The correct way to encapsulate messages is with
>  >cleartext. I often delete PGP-MIME messages without reading them because
>  >it's such a pain to deal with them.
>
>windows, as the (almost unreadable) "...ems" message looks annoyingly
>similar to a (usually unreadable) SMIME message.  I too tend to
>delete these messages, as they are functionally equivalent to spam.
>
>I agree it's the MUA's job to handle this civilly, but until that
>happens, the cleartext solution is much more likely to be usable in
>the real world.

Alas, Jon and Rodney, sometimes it is die-hard positions brought on
by inflexible opinions (present company excluded, of course ;)
  --rather than new solutions responding to technological challenges
and requiring minimal adoption/implementation efforts-- that
represent the real hindrances to crypto deployment.

Whining about .EMS attachments, not to mention trashing them
literally and figuratively as you're doing, solves nothing. It also
ignores the easy workaround. It's like complaining that some people
send you faxes when you prefer email. Buy a fax machine! By
complaining that, just because a common extension isn't yet supported
by MUA devs, this "decreases" usage, you're basically just
illustrating the real problem: refusing to help because of narrow
vision. Instead, why not try calling one of your friends at M$ and
spending five minutes asking her/him to approve the week (max) of
engineering effort it would take to support OpenPGP/MIME. If I can
think of a business case, you certainly could if you tried.

Of course, I admit I may be slightly biased, as a co-author of two
new OP/M (acro-pun intended ;) drafts, one which supercedes RFC2015,
the other adding a useful and basic feature to OpenPGP/MIME (parallel
sigs _could_ be a major benefit to MUA implementors if they had any
vision at all).

In any case, legacy clear-sigs cannot not solve some of our more
"modern" problems and are not usable in the real world because users
(even you, apparently) can't figure out how to open the attachment
and decrypt. Further, the world is moving forwards, not just
sideways. IMHO, the two of you need to get with The Program and
encourage OP/M adoption rather than making this sound like another
religious ASCII-zealotry battle. I like ASCII, even prefer it, but I
live in a real world with >ack-pfft< various file formats... and
those annoying faxes.

    dave

_______________________________________________________________________
"I'm a 'peripheral visionary' ...that means I can see clearly into the
  future ...but only way off to the side."  --Stephen Wright