Adam Back wrote: > So I was trying to decrypt this stored mail sent to me by a > GPG user, and lo pgp6.x failed to decrypt it.
[Long story about PGP/gpg version incompatibility elided] If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the latest version of gpg has a bug in that it doesn't support older PGP encrypted messages that are encrypted using IDEA. Which could be fixed quite easily. And then I believe I hear you saying that there are ancient version of PGP that can't decrypt messages created by newer versions of PGP/gpg. Which is true. My archival copy of Netscape 0.9 beta has a hard time with just about any website out there today as well. Doesn't really bother me, to be honest. I guess that I would tell the person that sent the email to re-send it, encrypted using a newer version of PGP/gpg. And move on to bigger fish. But that's me. The other day, I received a fax that my fax machine complete garbled because the sender's fax machine mis-fed the original. So I asked the person to re-fax the document. And guess what: the fax came out perfectly readable. If the performance standards some expect from email encryption programs were applied to fax machines, they would cease to use fax machines until somebody develops a fax machine that cannot, under any circumstances, mis-feed a document. I suspect the wide-spread use of fax would still be a few decades in the future. --Lucky
