Re: [Mutt] #3067: PGP/MIME signatures incorrectly assigned
#3067: PGP/MIME signatures incorrectly assigned "Content-Disposition: inline"
Comment (by jrollins):
In multi-part email, all of the body parts are commonly called
attachments, which should not influence how a given part is displayed.
This is what Thomas mentions above, and I completely agree with this
statement. What *is* meant to influence how a given part is displayed
is the Content-Disposition header. This is the point of this header,
to suggest to MUAs how a particular part should be displayed if the
MUA is unfamiliar it's MIME type.
OpenPGP signatures, as PGP/MIME type parts, should, by the most
enlightened MUAs, be processed as OpenPGP signatures, and the outcome
of that processing should be displayed to the user.
MUAs that are unfamiliar with or unable to process PGP/MIME parts
should look to the Content-Disposition header to determine how to
display the part.
MUAs that can not process signatures and are currently displaying
PGP/MIME parts from mutt inline (ie. gmail) are in fact doing the
right thing since they are honoring the Content-Disposition header as
set. MUAs can of course choose to ignore the Content-Disposition and
display the part as they wish, but that is up to them, and they do so
at their own peril.
I think this argument shows clearly that parts with
Content-Disposition set to "inline" should be displayed inline, and
parts with Content-Disposition set to "attachment" should be displayed
as attachments. Conversely, parts that should be displayed inline
should have Content-Disposition set to "inline", and parts that should
be displayed as attachments should have Content-Disposition set to
"attachment".
The question that remains is about how PGP/MIME parts should be
displayed by MUAs that can not process them. Unprocessed PGP/MIME
parts are meaningless character strings, and should therefore never be
displayed inline. Thus the Content-Disposition for PGP/MIME parts
should not be "inline". I think jmcclelland, dkg, and I have all
argued for this fairly persuasively. If this reasoning is correct,
then the Content-Disposition of PGP/MIME parts should be set to
"attachment" and what mutt is currently doing is wrong.
I understand that making a new user-configurable variable for this
would be too much work. I therefore believe that the most logical
solution is to change to Content-Disposition for PGP/MIME parts to be
"attachment". Since this is a fairly trivial change, I hope that we
can see it in a future version.
Thank you very much for your attention to this matter.
--
Ticket URL: <http://dev.mutt.org/trac/ticket/3067#comment:8>