Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Michael's PGP Signature - Re: Fsuk-manchester Digest, Vol 36, Issue 3

[MJ Ray]

Pete Morris wrote:
> See now that raises an interesting question in itself. As you can
> probably see from my reply, unless you make a habit of personally
> inserting manual line breaks into your emails after x number of
> characters, your email has been "mangled" somewhat or somewhere
> along the way. [....]

Not really.  Good email clients (not the Oracle Connector for Outlook
10.1.3.0.11 110130 (12.0.6514) that sent the above) insert line breaks
themselves pre-signing and set appropriate things like format=flowed
to tell other client it's OK to make it look neat at display time.

If I remember correctly, nothing in the specs requires a mail
transport agent not to mess with mail contents - not only can they
play with whitespace, but they can also add stuff and still conform to
the spec - but no good mail agent messes up the email body.  

PGP/MIME has suffered various things (including default settings on
some versions of mailman IIRC) stripping or otherwise messing with
the signature part.

Finally, do we care if the message integrity has been compromised by
a human, a bad mail agent or echelon?


I don't often sign list email (its integrity has probably been
compromised by its author before that point ;-) ), but I understand
why some do.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)  Webmaster and LMS developer at     | software
www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk        |  .... co
IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html |  .... op