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

[Heiko Schäfer <[e-mail]>]

Hey Andrew, list,

> I have just uploaded a first draft that specifies a potential 
> replacement for cleartext-signed MIME email. This arose from one of 
> the discussions at the 9th OpenPGP Email Summit last month, where DKG, 
> Kai and I agreed to draw up a proposal based on the views expressed by 
> the attendees.
>
> Instead of including the signature as an attachment, we propose that 
> the signature is contained within a novel MIME header in the top-level 
> MIME part. The principal advantage of this is that naive MUAs should 
> silently ignore unknown MIME-part headers, which addresses the 
> “unknown attachment” UX problem when using traditional PGP/MIME.
>
> While this proposal only specifies an OpenPGP message format, it 
> should be extensible to similar signed-only MIME formats.

While I can't judge the finer points of MIME, the general direction of 
this idea seems very good to me, and very much worth pursuing.

As Vincent (and also Andrew) have argued over on [openpgp-email], I also 
believe that the attempts to handle OpenPGP signatures as attachments 
have been valiant and prolonged and haven't resulted in a good outcome.

Exploring a different path (as proposed in this draft) strikes me as 
very appropriate.

Thanks,
:) Heiko