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[debianuser@xxxxxxxxx: GPG: Encrypting messages truncates trailing whitespace]



Maybe somebody here is better equipped to answer his question?

 - Dave


----- Forwarded message from debianuser <debianuser@xxxxxxxxx> -----

Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 22:41:33 -0500
From: debianuser <debianuser@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: GPG: Encrypting messages truncates trailing whitespace
To: mutt-users@xxxxxxxx
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.5.1+cvs20040105i
X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out003.verizon.net from
 [64.222.36.124] at Thu, 22 Jan 2004 21:41:30 -0600
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Hello,

In testing encrypting and signing messages to my key, I've been having
some problems, where the trailing space in my signature delimiter "-- "
is truncated when I encrypt (only) messages.  Strangely enough, this
does not occur when I encrypt and sign messages.  I started at the
gnupg-users list to determine if the problem were with gpg, and after
running some tests, I believe the issue to be related to Mutt.  I'm
forwarding my best guess for what's going wrong; I'm wondering if Mutt
isn't protecting the trailing whitespaces with quoted-printable encoding
before encrypting with the --textmode flag, which I presume is there for
a reason, and don't wish to remove.  Of course, the problem could be
something entirely different.

If there is anything I can send or do to help nail down the source of
this issue, please let me know!

Nick

----- Forwarded message from debianuser <debianuser@xxxxxxxxx> -----

Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 20:47:12 -0500
From: debianuser <debianuser@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Encrypting messages truncates trailing whitespace
To: gnupg-users@xxxxxxxxx
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.5.1+cvs20040105i

I went ahead and checked out what my default pgp settings were with
Mutt, as shipped with Debian Sid.  Here are the differences between
encryption only and sign + encrypt (sorry about the long lines):

set pgp_encrypt_only_command="/usr/lib/mutt/pgpewrap gpg  --charset utf-8    
--batch  --quiet  --no-verbose --output - --encrypt --textmode --armor 
--always-trust -- -r
 %r -- %f"
set pgp_encrypt_sign_command="/usr/lib/mutt/pgpewrap gpg  --charset utf-8 
--passphrase-fd 0  --batch --quiet  --no-verbose  --textmode --output - 
--encrypt --sign %?a?-
u %a? --armor --always-trust -- -r %r -- %f"

Since --textmode appears with both invocations, I'm guessing the problem
is otherwise.  I went ahead and ran the modified test you suggested
Darren, and sure enough, line endings were stripped off with --textmode.
I've found though that this is expected behavior.  Ingo says[1]:

> According to the OpenPGP spec trailing white spaces have to be removed 
> in text mode before signing. If you don't want them to be removed don't 
> use the text mode.

I then ran into a post by Werner, where he explains[2]:

> If you are writing an email client,
> you should better make sure that there are no trailing whites spaces
> (they cause compatibility problems with old PGP versions) and if you
> want a trailing white space (say for the "-- " prefix), you should
> convert the mail to quoted-printable.

I then recalled that Mutt has a configuration setting that ensures it
encodes the message as quoted-printable in order to protect such
whitespace.  I'll copy the text here:

>  pgp_strict_enc
> 
>  Type: boolean
>  Default: yes
> 
>  If set, Mutt will automatically encode PGP/MIME signed messages as
>                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>  quoted-printable. Please note that unsetting this variable may lead to
>  problems with non-verifyable PGP signatures, so only change this if you
>  know what you are doing.

I'm wondering now if the behavior I'm seeing is because Mutt is
correctly encoding my signed+encrypted message as quoted-printable,
thereby eliminating all trailing spaces before they are stripped off,
but is *not* doing this for encrypted only messages.

To those of you more familiar with these software packages, is this at
all plausible?  If you think so, I'll head over to Mutt-users and see
what they have to say.

Thanks again for the help,

Nick

[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gnupg-users&m=99445372020149&w=2

[2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gnupg-users&m=98157314315351&w=2
----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Encrypted messages are encouraged.
Please use key BE291159, available at http://blug.brown.edu/ye-olde-key.asc
Primary key fingerprint: 4441 EEF7 F63D 8E2E AC83  CC25 7E61 4300 BE29 1159

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor?
It's simple, Skyler.  You've seen what food processors do to food, right?

Please visit this link:
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