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Re: Question about PGP Signatures.



On Sat, Aug 14, 2004 at 07:12:14PM -0400, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> I have the patch installed.  That was my earlier solution to this 
> problem.  But I want to avoid PGP traditinal because it's deprecated.  I 
> don't like the idea of holding back progress because Microsoft couldn't be 
> bothered to support a standard.  So instead I'm switching to PGP/MIME and 
> just not signing the emails going to Outlook users.

As a former Pine user, I really find this argument irritating.  The
fact is there are LOTS of clients which don't handle PGP-MIME, and in
many cases they aren't likely to any time soon.  The reason has to do
with international laws regarding encrpytion...  Exporting encryption
software is generally illegal in the US, though restrictions have been
relaxed recently, but the fear among some is that they will be
reinstituted at some not-so-distant future date.  Also using
encryption software is illegal in some countries, so some development
teams refuse to add encryptions support, not unreasonably.  Pine is
one example of another popular mailer (which doesn't suck) that
doesn't have PGP-MIME support, and probably never will.  This is the
major reason I switched to mutt, but unfortunately not everyone has
that luxury...

The fact is, most of the PGP-using world still uses traditional PGP
(though PGP-MIME /is/ getting a lot more common), partly because
everyone else does, and partly because it's easy to use with clients
that don't directly support it.  The RFCs may call traditional PGP
"deprecated", but from the standpoint of practicality that's just
silly.

And if you want to keep signing your messges to that list, there's no
reason you can't have a send-hook set pgp_traditional instead of not
signing the messages...

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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