Re: Gnus 5.10.6 problems with PGP/MIME (test cases)

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>]

>>>>> In <53032.1137578648@juniper.net> Mark D. Baushke wrote:

> Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org> writes:

>> Doesn't the patch cause inconvenience to DOS users?

> It should work without any problems to DOS users.

> What is happening is that --textmode tells GnuPG to send a literal
> Data Packet (Tag 11) with a data format of 't' (0x74) to specify
> that the packet contains text data and thus may need line ends
> converted to local form, or other text-mode changes.

[...]

Thank you for the information.  I roughly understood that
`gpg --textmode' generates a *text* packet and recipients should
treat it as text because it is *text*.

[...]

> Note: I have played with both method=pgpmime and method=pgp and I
> have found that the largest number of OpenPGP aware mail user agents
> being used by the people that received my encrypted and/or signed
> e-mail are able to handle method=pgp more often than method=pgpmime.

> That said, if I were using method=pgpmime and I had an attachment
> that was a binary file, the patch I provided would be a
> problem. There is no way to tell PGP that the contents of one
> content-type should be --textmode (the body of the message) while
> the contents of the attachment should be in --no-textmode (or
> defaulted to binary mode). In binary mode, text lines are to be
> canonicalized to use CRLF for purposes of generating signatures.

> The big problem here, is if I have multiple attachments that also
> need to be encrypted and some of those attachments are binary and
> some are text. There is no easy way to express to MH-E or Gnus that
> --textmode should only be used for the lines in the text part of the
> message and that the attachment must be treated as binary.

I was also worried about things similar.  However, I noticed
pgg-gpg-encrypt-region uses pgg-as-lbt, which always add CRs to
line endings.  Perhaps it is not wrong that I consider it is
designed to handle only text.  Though, it might be data encoded
by base64, etc.  In fact, there seems to be no way to encrypt
binary data directly using Gnus and MML.  Could anyone correct
me?

I will install your patch if no one comments.

By the way, I found out the original author changed it not to
use --textmode over six years ago.

1999-11-05   Daiki Ueno  <>
[...]
	* pgg-gpg.el (encrypt-region): Don't use "--textmode" in GPG
	arguments, replace line break code with CRLF while signing
	instead.

This was done in SEMI before PGG was imported into Gnus.  But I
believe --textmode is needed there now.

> What I end up using is either separate PGP encrypted components, or
> I do a base64 or uuencode of my binary attachment prior to adding it
> to my message to be sent.

> So, it is clear that my patch is not good in the general case,
> however, it is probably desirable to have some way for MH-E to
> indicate that the --textmode should be used for the body of the
> message and not used for an attachment.

> I would be more than willing to help you test any changes you might
> want to add to help make this more configurable to Gnus.