From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/31913 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Nuutti Kotivuori Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: why application/pgp; x-action=sign != application/pgp-signature ? Date: 24 Jul 2000 18:35:12 +0300 Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: <877laby21b.fsf@sonera.com> References: <2ng0p2drrz.fsf@tiger.jia.vnet> NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035168270 16762 80.91.224.250 (21 Oct 2002 02:44:30 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 02:44:30 +0000 (UTC) Cc: ShengHuo ZHU , ding@gnus.org Return-Path: Original-Received: from fisher.math.uh.edu (fisher.math.uh.edu [129.7.128.35]) by mailhost.sclp.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4C1C3D051E for ; Mon, 24 Jul 2000 11:40:19 -0400 (EDT) Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu (lists@Sina.HPC.UH.EDU [129.7.3.5]) by fisher.math.uh.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id KAC09242; Mon, 24 Jul 2000 10:40:00 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Mon, 24 Jul 2000 10:39:06 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from mailhost.sclp.com (postfix@sclp3.sclp.com [204.252.123.139]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA16270 for ; Mon, 24 Jul 2000 10:38:48 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from smtp.dave.sonera.fi (smtp.dave.sonera.fi [131.177.130.21]) by mailhost.sclp.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1856CD051E for ; Mon, 24 Jul 2000 11:39:21 -0400 (EDT) Original-Received: from kotivnu1-nb.ete.tele.fi ([131.177.214.96]:2121 "EHLO oro") by inside.dave.sonera.fi with ESMTP id ; Mon, 24 Jul 2000 18:39:06 +0300 Original-Received: from naked by oro with local (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 13GkG8-0000yP-00; Mon, 24 Jul 2000 18:35:12 +0300 Original-To: Cyrille Lefevre In-Reply-To: (Cyrille Lefevre's message of "23 Jul 2000 20:32:52 +0200") Original-Lines: 51 User-Agent: T-gnus/6.14.4 (based on Gnus v5.8.6) EMY/1.13.6 (Life is balance) FLIM/1.13.2 (Kasanui) APEL/10.2 MULE XEmacs/21.1 (patch 10) (Capitol Reef) (i386-debian-linux) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:31913 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:31913 "Cyrille" == Cyrille Lefevre writes: > well, I go to iana to find the specs about pgp, which refer to rfc2015 > which only known about application/pgp-something. so, you are right and > the product I'm using seems to be wrong. maybe it is (always) using an > pre-standard. who knowns ? Um. There's three ways to send PGP messages. The first, the oldest, the broken one is to just use PGP to clearsign something and tag it into the message body. The message Content-Type: will be text/plain, if there even is a content-type. The message body will contain the normal 'BEGIN PGP SIGNED TEXT' etc. parts. Then there's PGP-Kaze - namings differ. Which is quite similar to the one above, but instead of the text/plain content type, we say application/pgp (with attributes telling if it's signed or encrypted or what). This is also called the traditional PGP mail. This does not work with attachments - you need to encrypt/sign every attachment separately, and you have no way of keeping them all together - eg. some attachment might be removed and no signature would be invalid. It has other problems as well. And then we have RFC2015, PGP/MIME standard. This is the only working one. It works by using MIME for everything, enclosing the whole signed or encrypted part in multipart/signed or multipart/encrypted content-type, and having the separate signature be application/pgp-signature. PGP/MIME is the working method, but very few programs are supporting it. Gnus does not support it either, tho some people (possibly including me) are developing it currently. So Gnus just _ignores_ the application/pgp-signature type and _does not_ verify the signature. Mutt is the de facto standard mailer for sending PGP/MIME messages. The other two methods are used interchangeably often, and are supported by the latest version of PGP plugins for windows. They are not really suited for anything but text messages, but people use them anyway since they have nothing better. Mailcrypt is the way to use these messages with Gnus. It comes with emacsen I think. So, your program sends the older, obsolete, standard type PGP messages which are handled by Mailcrypt, but which are the most commonly used messagetypes currently. The newer standard is displayed properly by Gnus, since the PGP/MIME standard allows correct text display even if the mailer does not support PGP/MIME, but it _cannot_ be used for writing such mails or to verify the signatures, which doesn't matter ofcourse if you are not interested. -- Naked