Re: Canonical methods for digitally signing and verifying

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

ShengHuo ZHU <zsh@cs.rochester.edu> writes:

> Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com> writes:
> 
> > And now for a different question:
> > 
> > Is there any way to tell gnus to encode my signed message as `8bit'
> > instead of as `quoted-printable' (in the `Content-Transfer-Encoding'
> > header[s] that appear in the signed message)?
> 
> 8bit CTE is not safe for PGP. Some MTAs convert 8bit text to QP or
> base64, which causes verification failure.

Ah ... thanks.

Forgive my ignorance about this subject, but will the quoted-printable
conversion cause problems under the following scenario? ...

I send 8bit email to one of my friends in South America, and this
email contains the special Spanish characters (accented vowels and n's
with tildes and upside-down question marks and exclamation points).

After being converted to quoted-printable, these characters become
3-character sequences, which a normal Spanish speaker would have a
hard time reading.

Assuming that my Spanish friend is using an email agent such as
Outlook or Netscape to read my letters, and assuming that she does
nothing to decode or verify my signature, is it likely that those two
email clients do the right thing with the quoted printable text that
I'm sending via gnus within my digitally signed message, and that the
characters will be converted back into the 8bit Spanish characters
when my friend is reading her email?

I'd like to start digitally signing ALL my outgoing messages, but
if the case I outlined above would cause problems, then perhaps
I'm going to have to be selective about the messages I sign and
don't sign digitally.

Thanks again, in advance.


> ShengHuo

- Lloyd


-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com