[TriLUG] Why evolution?

[Tanner Lovelace]

Chris Knowles wrote:
> Here's my biggest peeve about the various mail clients...
> 
> The various forms that PGP/GPG signatures take.  Can enigmail read both
> the kmail type and the evo type?  If so, I'm probably switching.

You're probably referring to inline PGP and PGP/MIME.  Yes, Enigmail
will handle both of those, with one caveat.  PGP/MIME support is
still labeled experimental.  It works if the top level message type
is application/pgp (or whatever the mime type is).  However, when
mailman 2.1 adds the list signature to a mime message, it encapsulates
it into another mime container.  Or, put this way (no guarantees
the mime types are accurate, but you should get the picture).

Original message type application/pgp
      made up of 2 parts --> text/plain and pgp/signature

becomes

New message type multipart/mixed
      made of of 2 parts -->  application/pgp
                               made up of 2 parts --> text/plain & pgp/sig
      and text/plain (the list signature)

Evolution will dig down into the first part and recognize it as a
pgp signed message that it needs to verify.  Enigmail, however,
only goes one level deep and doesn't recognize that as a signed
message.  That's my only complaint about it.  If you want more information
about this bug, here's the bugzilla entry:

http://mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4601

I've been meaning to try to dig into the code to see what I could
figure out about it, but the mozilla codebase isn't for the
faint of heart! :-)

Cheers,
Tanner