[Techtalk] PGP siging mail

[jm]

begin electrogrammati illius Teri Solow
> The purpose of this message is twofold: first, to see what happens
> when I send a PGP-signed mail to the list, and to find out whether
> this annoys anyone, or whether anyone cannot read it (in which case I
> don't expect many replies).

> Secondly, I'm wondering about your opinions regarding signing all
> mail, including work email (which you can pretty much guarantee will
> be read by people using Outlook).  I have heard that some mail clients
> (most notably Outlook) do not understand multipart/signed attachments,
> and will for some reason make the body of an email only viewable as an
> attachment in the case where it receives attachments it doesn't
> understand.  Of course, I'm not sure how old that information is, and
> for all I know it ceased to be valid years ago.  But that's what I'm
> asking all of you for- to get feedback from people who likely have
> more experience than I do.  :)

Interestingly, your pgp signature attachment was not
attached... guessing the MLM server stripped it? (I have mutt set
up to auto-verify all signed mail, works great; I get a lot of
signed mail, am on a lot of nerdy mailing lists.) :^) I have read
that the newest Outlook, not Outlook Express however, now handles
multipart/signed mail properly, as opposed to only displaying an
inscrutable list of attachments, also there is even a GnuPG plugin
for Outlook available... 

Signing work email involves a considerable amount of user-education
and is hard w/o a supportive infrastructure (i.e., everyone using a
good email client, etc). But if you do want to sign all your work
email (there are many good reasons to, obviously) I'd suggest
"signing inline" (the old style, where the sig is embedded in the
message body), not multipart/signed - at least that way you can
be sure all clients will be able to read the mail, and all you
have to deal with are complaints of "What's all this crap at the
beginning and end of your email? You must have a virus!!" :P

-jm
-- 
NP: silence