Re: [PLUG] Possible Trojan/Virus in the wild?

[Bill Jonas <bill@billjonas.com>]

On Sun, May 05, 2002 at 02:16:30PM -0400, ian reinhart geiser wrote:
> any mutt users ideas on this?

It's because Mutt is standards-compliant.[1]  With clearsigning, an MUA
would be required to parse the content of the message.  We see how
successful that is with certain virus-prone mailers (eg, displaying the
rest of the message as an attachment when you have a line that starts
with 'begin  ').  It's felt that parsing the body of the message for
information that is better conveyed through headers (either MIME or
RFC2822) will lead to subtle bugs and vulnerabilities.

This is also in the Mutt FAQ.  For the terse answer, see
<http://www.fefe.de/muttfaq/faq.html#pgpmime>.

[1] <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2015.txt>, and see also
<http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/openpgp-charter.html>.

-- 
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
"They that can give up  essential  liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."        -- Benjamin Franklin

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