pgg-signed messages and hyphens

pgg-signed messages and hyphens

[Norbert Koch]

Hi!

I take it, it's a feature that lines beginning with a couple of
hyphens are changed if I pgg-sign a message, ie

--------- other stuff

becomes

- ------- other stuff

so that the end marker can be searched for?

norbert.

Re: pgg-signed messages and hyphens

[Simon Josefsson]

Norbert Koch <viteno@xemacs.org> writes:

> Hi!
>
> I take it, it's a feature that lines beginning with a couple of
> hyphens are changed if I pgg-sign a message, ie
>
> --------- other stuff
>
> becomes
>
> - ------- other stuff
>
> so that the end marker can be searched for?

Yes, it is called dash escaping, see RFC 2440.

It is an open question whether Gnus should instead use QP for these
message, and rewrite your line before signing into:

%2d-------- other stuff

This would prevent the PGP implementation of dash escape the message.

The advantage is that the PGP output will be compatible with RFC 1991
and pre-OpenPGP implementations.  The disadvantage is that QP is used,
which is ugly and might potentially invalidate the signature if there
is any MUA out there that perform QP decoding before PGP verification.