Re: PGP support

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Matt Armstrong wrote:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
> 
> > Thanks to Sascha Lüdecke ROT13(<fnfpun@zrgn-k.qr>) we now have PGP (as
> > in RFC 1991, not 2015/3156 which we already have) support in CVS.
> 
> For the RFC ignorant, what is the difference?
> 
> I think we had PGP/MIME.  What is RFC 1991?

PGP (RFC 1991/2440) means plain (Open)PGP blobs inserted into mail without
any MIME awareness at all.  It is what Mailcrypt natively supports.  
PGP/MIME (RFC 2015/3156) is PGP with MIME awareness.  Oort has supported
PGP/MIME for some time, using gpg.el or Mailcrypt as the backend.

With a few more menu items and commands added to Gnus, such as "Insert
Public Key", I don't have to use the Mailcrypt menu hooks at all.

Also, it would be nice if we could interop with those Outlook PGP plugins.  
It seems as if they support a MIME-aware PGP mode that isn't 2015/3156, 
but rather having all MIME headers etc look as if it was a unencrypted 
mail, and before sending, wrapping each MIME body in a PGP blob.  Everyone 
I communicate with seem to use the stuff, so I'll probably add it.

Maybe we should add a FSF-owned PGP-backend as well.  The FLIM/SEMI people
seem to have one, but it requires a few files that look old and
non-FSF-owned.  Hm..

> > As you can see, the PGP armors are QPified.
> 
> For the lingo ignorant like myself, what does QPified mean?  :-)

QP is a horrible escape language for non-ASCII stuff in mail.  "To QPify" 
means to add QP encoding in a piece of data.  That's about all you want to 
know about QP, I think. :-)