Re: encrypted mails and quoted-printable

[Nuutti Kotivuori <nuutti.kotivuori@smarttrust.com>]

Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> ShengHuo ZHU <zsh@cs.rochester.edu> writes:
> 
>> Andreas Jaeger <aj@suse.de> writes:
>> 
>>> Composing the appended email with gpg.el under current CVS the
>>> text is in quoted printable - but there's no need for it since all
>>> characters are ASCII.  I even prefer iso-8859-1 and have set up
>>> the necessary vars for it AFAIK.
>>> 
>>> Any ideas why I still get quoted-printable?
>> 
>> QP encoding is to avoid the article to be mangled.  Though a
>> message contains only ASCII, lines starting with "From " or so be
>> mangled.
> 
> I see - but that's rather unfortunate.  Is there no way to avoid
> this?  I'd rather don't use QP.

,----[ RFC2015 ]
| For this reason all data signed according to this protocol MUST be
| constrained to 7 bits (8- bit data should be encoded using either
| Quoted-Printable or Base64).
`----

,----[ RFC2015 ]
| Though not required, it is generally a good idea to use Quoted-
| Printable encoding in the first step (writing out the data to be
| signed in MIME canonical format) if any of the lines in the data begin
| with "From ", and encode the "F".  This will avoid an MTA inserting a
| ">" in front of the line, thus invalidating the signature!
`----

So, if the message is exactly 7-bit, the standard does not _require_
you to use quoted printable, but does recommend it.

Ofcourse, News is generally decidedly 8-bit clean and unmangling, so
one might break the standard there to be nice.

-- Naked