--On Monday, 13 October, 2014 20:25 -0400 Scott Kitterman <scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I went back and looked at a random sampling of the PGP > encrypted mails I've received over the last couple of years. > 100% of them were multipart: > > Content-Type: multipart/encrypted; > protocol="application/pgp-encrypted"; Interesting. We must be seeing different communities. Very subjectively, I'd guess that about half of the PGP encrypted (whether signed or not) and almost all of the signed-but-not-encrypted messages are in ASCII armored form, not multipart/encrypted. I have speculations about the reasons for both, but the bottom line in: -- multipart/encrypted isn't as successful as we had expected -- The ASCII armor format which, IIR, predates multipart/encryption and may make up part of the reason for Ned's observation that the PGP community didn't like MIME very much, is still alive an well. Ned is obviously correct -- ASCII armor doesn't do a thing for complex, structured, messages while multipart/encrypted was designed to handle them and does. But that fact has never eliminated the cases in which the message payload is a singe, text-style, body part and standalone PGP processors can created a signed and/or encrypted block of text that is then pasted into (really instead of) a conventional message. john