Cisco and the tobacco industry

Sun Jul 31 00:35:00 UTC 2005

Roy Badami wrote:
>     Geo> Gee, it must be nice to be in the top 10% of the smart
>     Geo> people. Why don't you suggest Valdis aim for the top 5% and
>     Geo> figure out how Mr. Jeffrey I. Schiller manages to post using
>     Geo> debian PGP signed messages that don't appear as attachments?
> 
> Having just taken a quick look, it appears the messages you like are
> just plain text with PGP markup, and the ones you don't are
> multipart/signed.
> 
> IIRC correctly any unrecognized multipart subtype is supposed to be
> rendered as multipart/mixed, so you should see the message fine,
> though the signature will probably appear as an attachment.

In an "open discussion forum" where unknown (lurker) participants may be 
using any type of mail client, the only appropriate message format is 
plain text and that includes messages that are PGP signed.  If you feel 
the need to PGP sign your post, the PGP .sig should be in plain text in 
the message body, not attached.  PGP .sig multipart/mixed attachments 
should be restricted to use in private email (or private lists) where 
you know the other parties are using a mailer capable of handling the 
attachment type.

(R. Thayer (see RFC 2240) agrees with this position, BTW.)

Don't bother quoting other RFCs, just because a standard exists for 
attaching "something" to email doesn't mean that DOING that in email to 
a discussion list is appropriate - for instance on this list it has been 
agreed that HTML attachments are not appropriate - and PGP attachments 
aren't appropriate either.  Plain text works.  Use it.

> If you're seriously suggesting that all signing of messages should be
> done entirely in-band within a plain-text message then, well, I
> disagree...  And so do Microsoft (IIRC they support S/MIME)

You think that because Microsoft does it this way, it's supposed to BE 
that way?  What's the point of having standards if we are going to let a 
monopoly company force their capricious software design choices on the 
rest of us?  Heck, we might as all start sending HTML email then, since 
AOL decided that should be the default, what, 5 years ago?

<sigh>

jc