[openpgp] Re: Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-gallagher-email-invisible-signatures-00.txt

[Steffen Nurpmeso <[e-mail]>]

Andrew Gallagher wrote in
 <[e-mail]>:

   This MIME structure MUST NOT be used as part of a Multilayer
   Cryptographic Envelope.  If it is found anywhere but the outside of
   the message it MUST NOT be treated as a Cryptographic Layer.

This is hard to understand.  You mean it is not recursive, or do
you mean that is must be on the outermost layer of the message,
and be the only layer multipart?  No to the latter?
(Later it is then made clear.)

   *  Content-Encoding is used to make the message 7-bit clean

I love this.

   *  If "From " starts a line, at least one letter of it should be
    encoded

Do you really mean "a 7-bit content-transfer-encoding is to be
enforced"?

   FIXME: is all this really necessary in 2025?  What if we said that an
   Invisibly Signed Message that needs 8BITMIME simply can't be
   transmitted across an MTA that doesn't support 8BITMIME?  Or what if
   we decided that it's OK if the signature breaks in that case?

I would say "yes", and if only to deal with bugs.  For example the
MUA i maintain simply passed 8-bit over SMTP regardless of the
above SMTP extension. .. except when S/MIME enforced convertion.
(Ie "could have", it was dependent upon user configuration, but
the default was 8-bit.  And it will support 8BITMIME only with the
next release.)

(I hm "love" Unicode and am practically most often 8-bit in
private (German), but i think the concept of "UTF-8 email" is
bogus -- in sofar as noone really can look at a raw message as it
is on the fly in current times; so many mysterious headers, etc,
the common image etc attachments surely content-encoded, and then
even larger to skip over, etc: any "normal" and "sane" person
needs a utility aka mail reader to deal with emails.  That little
piece of text is alone in its transport 8-bit clean data quest.)

May i ask why the hp="clear" parameter was added?  Isn't it enough
to create the Sig: header?  The "cryptographic payload" begins
directly after the Sig: header.

--steffen
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