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Re: [Mutt] #3039: mutt-1.5.17: wrong character set for traditional PGP



#3039: mutt-1.5.17: wrong character set for traditional PGP

Comment (by Alain Bench):

 {{{
 Hi Thomas,

  On Friday, March 21, 2008 at 11:54:31 -0000, Thomas Roessler wrote:

 > - Clearsigned messages. In this case, the original message's character
 > set is preserved, the message is signed, and the signed message then
 > MIME encoded, probably as text/plain. It's pretty clear that we don't
 > expect PGP to do any character set mangling in this case, so the
 > text/plain body part's charset parameter is properly set to whatever
 > the message is written in.

     Wrong: The original message's charset is not preserved. Mutt
 converts it to UTF-8 before signing.


 > - Encrypted messages. In this case, all we see on the MIME level is
 > information about the ASCII armor, plus whatever might be around it.
 > There is simply no information on the MIME level about what hides
 > inside the armor.

     Again wrong: There are hints. They can be absent, or wrong, but most
 of the time they accurately represent the enclosed charset.

     Also wrong on the sending side: Mutt knows which charset it passes
 to encryption. And we know for sure that at a later time decryption will
 recreate the exact same charset.


 > To give one example, there might be a message in some obscure
 > encoding, say, iso-8859-7, that then includes an ASCII armored,
 > encrypted message in UTF-8 which itself happens to be in Klingon.

     Without a "Charset: utf-8" armor header, Tamo's patch would fail.
 But it would succeed otherwise. Straight Mutt succeeds in both cases.
 Nicely crafted example.

     What about another one from real world: A Latin-9 encrypted message
 with a Latin-9 "Charset:" armor header and a Latin-9 MIME label. Mutt
 fails, Tamo succeeds.


 > No, this isn't beautiful, but it seemed to be the most consistent
 > interpretation of the relevant specifications.

     Another interpretation exists. And I fear to suspect that it
 provides a better interoperability in practice.


 Bye!    Alain.
 }}}

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.mutt.org/trac/ticket/3039#comment:>