Precisely. Once MIME enters the picture, the user agent must be looked at as a collection of subsystems driven by the MIME structure of the message. None of the subsystems (other than the MIME parser) *ever* deals with a whole message; the user agent is presented with an assembly of bodyparts and deals each part out to the subsystem best equipped to interpret it.
There was a previous comment asserting that various applicable standards require certain content-types in the *message header*. Any such standard is broken, because the thing with which it deals may be nested within a hierarchy of other things (with other content-types) of any depth. What *should* happen is that a multipart/signed or multipart/encrypted bodypart is detected *somewhere* within a message; it is given to gnupg or pgp or 'openssl smime' or whatever to interpret; the interpreted content is given back to the MIME interpreter; the content is seen to be a multipart/alternative bodypart; the user agent (for reasons I will never understand :-) selects the text/html bodypart; that bodypart is given to an HTML interpreter, and as text/html is terminal w.r.t. MIME the process is complete (up to the node at which the multipart/whatever bodypart resides). External references from text/html bodyparts are the concern of the HTML interpreter; the OpenPGP interpreter has already done its job. If they are to be secured, HTTP specifies mechanisms for doing that. It sounds like some user agents are continuing the grand tradition of implementing MIME poorly where they bother to do so at all. I suspect that the sign/encrypt community's role here will be limited to repeating, "if you would follow the specifications then it would Just Work" until the clue is accepted. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he means the exact opposite.
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