[H-GEN] Re: Linux Networking - Some Basic Questions

[Anthony Towns]

On Sun, Feb 27, 2000 at 07:42:47PM +1000, Darrin Mison wrote:
> Actually are my emails turning up as two attachments, one the text message
> and the other the pgp signature?  I've had people complain about this before
> but they were all outlook users... so <shrug>.  Their bug not mine.

Well, neither's true really. Mutt does actually send signed email as
two MIME components. The content type is `multipart/signed', and the
two components are `text/plain' and `application/pgp-signature'.

This is in accordance with rfc 2015 (which is a `proposed standard').
Comparing and contrasting the author of rfc2015 and the author of mutt
is left as an exercise to the reader.

I believe (older versions of?) pine has some issues with grokking
MIME-PGP'ed mail too, eg. Eudora and other mailers may well too. But
in any event, interpreting a MIME component that you don't understand
as just a strange attachment is probably pretty reasonable, assuming
they still happily show you the text/plain portion. This is, of course,
how I personally rationalise the conflict between sending out strange
and complexly formatted emails with the "be conservative in what you
transmit and liberal in what you accept" philosophy.

Windows people can, of course, consider this penance for all the
multipart/alternative mail that's been inflicted on the net...

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.

 ``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it 
        results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
                                        -- Linus Torvalds
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 350 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.humbug.org.au/pipermail/general/attachments/20000227/93b57114/attachment.sig>