On Monday, October 13, 2014 21:35:56 John C Klensin wrote: > --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 Virtually everyone I'm getting encrypted/signed mail from is running Linux or some other Unix like operating system and using GnuPG. That may account for why I see what I see. I did go back and look at a few signed mails and they are multipart as well: Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp- signature"; boundary="..." Content-Disposition: inline .... Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline ... Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Description: Digital signature YMMV, of course, but from where I sit at least it seems to be ~all one way. Scott K