PA Bear writes:

Robert Aldwinckle wrote:
A surprise for me is that both Google Groups and
the web interface seem to have no trouble with Sam's replies.

Hints from headers?...

X-Mailer: http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/
snip
Content-Type: multipart/signed;
boundary="=_mimegpg-commodore.email-scan.com-11676-1141905612-0004";

Further clue: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2015.html

Category: Standards Track, October 1996

A ten-year old Internet standard.

For the clue impaired: as a rule, Internet standards are fully backwards
compatible. A compliant mail client is not required to have any encryption
or digital signature-verification capabilities in order to show
digitally-signed messages. For example: Mozilla Thunderbird, out of the
box, displays digitally-signed messages perfectly fine, and no differently
than non-signed mail. This is because it's a MIME formatted message, and
any E-mail client that properly implements MIME will parse digitally-signed
messages as ordinary multipart MIME messages, perhaps with a tiny
attachment. Mozilla Thunderbird even has a tiny bit of additional logic of
suppressing the attachment that holds the digital signature. Even though
Thunderbird needs a PGP plugin to handle MIME-PGP mail, without the plugin,
and because Thunderbird properly implements MIME, unlike Outlook, it
displays the contents of signed messages without making a big fuss.

Where Microsoft screwed up, and has been incapable of fixing, for the last
ten years, is explained by section 7.2.6 of RFC 1521 (RFC 2046 eventually
superceded RFC 1521, but RFC 1521 was in effect at the time):

7.2.6. Other Multipart subtypes

Other multipart subtypes are expected in the future. MIME
implementations must in general treat unrecognized subtypes of
multipart as being equivalent to "multipart/mixed".

Of course, complying with Internet standards is not a top priority for
Microsoft. If Microsoft's virus distribution software was correctly
designed, in accordance with Internet standards, even if it chooses not
implement digitally-signed messages, which use multipart/signed, it should
treat them exactly as "multipart/mixed" messages, which are ordinary
messages, with ordinary attachments.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft's bugware has extensive support for
multipart/related MIME type (RFC 2387), which was introduced in 1998, two
years after multipart/signed.

So, for the last ten years, clueless MS cheerleaders have been constantly
whining because Outlook Express vomits all over itself when it sees a signed
message. They always blame everyone else when the real problem is the buggy
crapware they're using to occasionally read E-mail (when it's not otherwise
busy sending viruses and trojans to all E-mail addresses pulled from the
address book).


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQBEEMNOx9p3GYHlUOIRAkLZAJoDfkDVBkbyiNv5QSdAmf IzhTPGywCeLIg2
LHvukJ95Qgka9Pt3ZffpWc0=
=bdmX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----