Sigh... I have to say, I've been discovering PGP/MIME to be quite a
problem. :-( There has to be something which can be done about this.
Here are problems I've encountered:
1) PGP/MIME signed documents don't work well with Outlook Express. In
particular, it seems to think the plaintext has to be viewed as an
attachment.
2) PGP/MIME support in basically ALL the windows mail clients out
there is shoddy at best. I still haven't found one that will properly
recognize a message as PGP/MIME, decode an encrypted message and then
validate the signature.
3) PGP/MIME seems to cause some e-mail clients (in particular Eudora)
to crash upon opening. I have no idea what the deal is with this.
4) Getting a windows e-mail client which can SEND PGP/MIME is next to
impossible... no wait, it is impossible. ;-) This makes using PGP/MIME
almost impossible.
5) I'm getting weird cases where a lot of mailers are claiming my PGP
signatures are invalid... regardless of whether I use PGP/MIME or if I
use encrypt & sign all inline.
6) When windows eudora people read my PGP/MIME e-mails from Mutt, they
claim the end-of-line character isn't working... it seems almost like
it's all decoding to a Unix "\n" instead of "\r\n".
The whole thing is that PGP is complicated enough by itself. When you
add in all these other problems, it makes it almost impossible for
most people to use. The success of things like PGP largely depends on
how convenient it is for people to do things the right way.
So, I guess I have two questions:
1) what can be done to improve upon the situation, and
2) if anyone else has had similar problems to mine, how did they get
around them?
--Chris
PGP signature
