-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 It would appear that on Aug 28, James Wilkinson did say: > Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote: > > Why so many seam to prefer the detached signature method, I do not know??? > > There's a very good review of the advantages and disadvantages of > the two methods, along with how to set up GPG with various mail > clients, at http://lwn.net/Articles/93640/ . > > In particular, Evolution will only understand MIME (apparently: I've > never got on with the program). Well thanks for the info James. That does explain why GRAPHICAL mail client users tend to use the detached sig method... In my case however I can't abide the user interface of any graphical mail client I've ever tried. ( I tend to minimally configure kmail and Mozilla's embedded mail client in case I NEED to send feedback to some org like my bank who somehow filter mail on if you have a current cookie from their web page during the sending... or I decide I really want to see the "intended" graphical view of a message instead of just deleting it for lack of actual text content.) But I settled on pine for my email client a long time ago so I do wish the author of that article had included non-graphical mail clients... And I'm not so sure that either authenticating the sender/content and/or encrypting should belong to the mail client. (except as a convenience) As I believe it should _ALWAYS_ be possible to save the message to disk with a non-gpg aware mail client and then point a command line (or gui) gpg client at the saved message to decrypt or authenticate it later. Speaking of gpg & pine however, I don't think pine directly supports mail client gpg. But it's content filters make it practical for some 3rd party filter/script gpg utilities such as "ez-pine-gpg" to use the embedded (ascii armored) version on the text bodies. ez-pine-gpg is automatically invoked when ascii armored gpg hash coding is present in the incoming message body... And if I have someones public key then I can select encryption from a send message dialog. But for basic message authentication purposes, (which is to me much more important than "encryption" for mail) I chose to fit my ~/.vimrc with some key mappings for spellchecking with aspell & gpg signing of the spellchecked document. And since I've yet to have a mail corespondent who wants me to send them encrypted mail, all I ever use ez-pine-gpg for is to automatically verify embedded ascii armored sigs. Because I chose pine, my choice of the ascii armored method of gpg was a forgone conclusion. But I would have chosen it anyway (even if pine supported both methods) as if the recipient's mail client doesn't support ascii armored gpg, then he/she can still simply export the message body to a file and manually run gpg on it. I don't think that works for the detached sig method used by so many mail clients. - -- | --- --- | Joe (theWordy) Philbrook <o> <o> | J(tWdy)P ^ | <<jtwdyp@xxxxxxxx>> /---\ "bla bla bla..." | \___/ "...and bla..." At least I know my mouth is running, I just can't find the off button! ############################################################## # You can find my public gpg key at http://pgpkeys.mit.edu/ # ############################################################## -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBMvtKRZ/61mwhY94RAum+AJ9QzOTcLAEbIFVl+JbQpWPQzAUlDgCdFu/n 50RLCzCORtauVhc1ZYtSIh4= =o3cg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
