E-mail conventions (was: Re: [plug] Debian VS Mandrake)

[Cameron Patrick]

Craig Foster wrote:

| ATT*.TXT attachments are usually caused by the mail list not wanting
| to break the signed emails, so they can go easily enough.

Could you explain what you mean by ATT*.TXT attachments?  Since I've
never seen them, I'd imagine they're somehow mailer-specific.

| As for crypto attachments, I would feel hypocritical if I didn't use
| them, due to my Thawte Notary status, however for this list it's
| only by habit that it gets sent.

FWIW, mutt complains that the signature is bad on your messages.  The
error messages from openssl are:

Verification failure
21844:error:21071065:PKCS7 routines:PKCS7_signatureVerify:digest failure:pk7_doit.c:803:
21844:error:21075069:PKCS7 routines:PKCS7_verify:signature failure:pk7_smime.c:265:

Probably it's because my mutt isn't set up properly, though.

I don't sign messages by default because Outlook is broken and will
display messages with PGP/MIME signatures as an empty message with an
attached text file.  The other alternative (inline signatures) results
in ugly great blocks of hexadecimal appearing in the body of the
message.

| Finally, we do go on about not munging email, so I think the removal
| of text/html would be very hypocritical, but executable content is
| an outweighing necessity.

There's something to be said for removing text/html when there's also
a text/plain alternative.  I think a lot of other mailing lists do
that.  Passing text/html-only messages through 'w3m -dump' before
they're sent on would at least stop people complaining about HTML mail :-)

Cameron.