"annoying" inline gpg signatures (Was : Re: How to put a file in RAM)

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

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It would appear that on Apr 6, Francisco Borges did say:

> » On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 08:38AM -0400, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
> 
> I say I'd have more respect for pine, if it could handle mime
> attachments properly <wink>
> 
> > verify from the command line, rather than ONLY being able to be
> > verified by a gpg aware mail client.
> 
> I can see part of your point.  It *would* be nice to do it on the
> command line as well.
> 
> However... the "message" I got from your email is:
> 
> 1. You are "addicted" to a non-free crappy mailer that causes you all
>    sorts of trouble, due to its incapacity to handle mime attachments
>    (hardly breakthrough tech these days BTW);

Depends on your idea of non-free... using pine is free as in beer...
It's not pine that causes me this trouble. I already have set up my
editor to do my outgoing gpg stuff for ANY text file I'm editing...

I don't find it to be at all crappy, but then of course one of it's best
virtues is that it runs in a terminal with no need for me to ever dust
off my trackball etc... 

Actually it can handle mime. If someone were to send a command line signed
file as a mime attachment, I could save said attachment and use the
command line gpg utility to verify it... So if the "standard" was
designed to allow for command line checking of the extracted attachment
without depending solely on the integrated gpg functions within _some_
e-mail clients, then pine users shouldn't have any trouble verifying the
ones they cared about.

In fact it was mime attachments (and the ability to save them to files)
that eventually convinced me to abandon mailx for pine in the first
place. Pine then keeps my usage by keeping the user interface fairly
stable, without requiring me to disturb my mouse pointer's position, And
with lots of on screen reminders for which commands are currently
applicable AND last but no means least, being completely usable in a
virtual console without HAVING to have x running. (if I should ever break
my x-server again, I'll NEED my customary methods of accessing
mail/newsgroups to still be working so I can use it to get help...)

> 2. and proceed to complain about how mime attachments don't particularly
>    help people that decide to ignore it and still want to get the job
>    done, in order to keep using crappy (non-free!) software??
> 
> Please.

No, not so as to keep using pine, rather so as to not have to use
someone else's idea of a good e-mail program... Also because I
strongly believe in being able to save something OUTSIDE my mail folders
and then to be able to still verify that it hasn't been modified at some
future point in time...

I have only marginal interest in being able to verify this from inside
my mail client. Thus have no interest in a method that is designed to
ONLY be usable from inside a mail client.

> Makes me think why we come up with standards in the first place and why
> it helps to use software that implements (widely used) standards.
> 
> [...]
> 
> If changing email/news client is really out of question, consider at
> least using a different editor. In emacs, at least, it would be very
> easy (select-region -> comment-dwin) to comment text with ">". Probably
> also easy with vim.

I don't have much problem with being able to quickly insert the ">" into
the manually quoted text with vim... I just didn't like the fact that the
reason I have to do this manually when replying to a signed message of
the type with the detached sig attachment is because the message body
text isn't actually in the message body, but in an attachment. Thus
having to use the clipboard or other means to import the unquoted text
to the message body of the reply, in order to have to insert the ">" in
the first place

My reason for jumping in to this thread was the statements that inline
sigs were annoying... I was trying to point out that what is annoying
may depend on ones point of view. 

   #############################################################
   ##_if_you'd_prefer_an_clearsigned_".asc"_text_file_of_this_##
   ##message_as_an_mime_encoded_attachment,just_ask_me_while__##
   ##it's_STILL_IN_my_outbox_folder_._._._=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+;-)_##
   #gpg sig for: Joe (theWordy) Philbrook DSA key ID 0x6C2163DE#
   # You can find my public gpg key at http://pgpkeys.mit.edu/ #
   #############################################################
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFEOExKRZ/61mwhY94RAoYmAJ0Zj+RKASwPb+ZkqqtR2MOwZcOSdgCgtsum
/Flr12H94ZcTgQtLMxWOZQI=
=3gl+
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