On Apr 7, 2015, at 11:07 AM, Ben McGinnes <b...@adversary.org> wrote:
> Ah, but if it is truly just the email address then is it sitting in
> the email field of the UID or the name field?
This has been a very illuminating conversation, and I just want to share
something that led me to this confusion initially. When I was considering an
email-only UID, I ran up against the issue that in gnupg's default mode of
operation, a name is required for a UID, whereas an email address is not. If I
try to enter a blank name while generating a key, gnupg issues an error: "Name
must be at least 5 characters long". My instinct was thus to specify the email
address in the name field.
I got it backwards because gnupg treats the name field as mandatory and the
email field as optional, which interestingly is the opposite of RFC 5322:
Normally, a mailbox is composed of two parts: (1) an
optional display name that indicates the name of the
recipient... and (2) an addr-spec address enclosed in
angle brackets. ("<" and ">"). There is an alternate
simple form of a mailbox where the addr-spec address
appears alone, without the recipient's name or the
angle brackets.
I realize now that an email-only UID should include angle brackets
("implementations SHOULD use the full name-addr form of the mailbox"), but I
wanted to share the thought process that led me to this mistake in the first
place.
--
Joey Castillo
www.joeycastillo.com
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