[openpgp] Re: Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-gall agher-email-unobtrusive-signatures-00.txt

Andrew Gallagher wrote in
 <[email protected]>:
 |We have just published a new version of the “invisible signatures” \
 |draft, now renamed to “unobtrusive signatures” to more accurately describe \
 |the mechanism being specified. Other changes include:
 |
 |* updated message canonicalization guidance
 |* proposed registries are now SPECIFICATION REQUIRED
 |* improved test vectors
 |* documented existing filename conventions
 |
 |Feedback is always welcome!

Only from a very short glance (for now).  It (still) says

  +   *  If "From " starts a line, at least one letter of it should be
  +      encoded

I think you should explicitly state what you mean here, and that
can only be that "From " at the start of the line enforces
a Content-Transfer-Encoding to be applied (QP or base64 that is).

All email people know about that, but ...  we talk the "magic
From_ quoting" problem to avoid that one message is de-facto
interpreted as multiple due to this "From " being treated as the
start of a new message.  Even though RFC 4155 well, exists, and
POSIX specifies

  line beginning with From<space>
  [one or more header fields; see Commands in mailx (on page 3112)]
  empty line
  [zero or more body lines
  empty line]
  [line beginning with From<space>...]

which actually makes for a pretty strict pattern, there is
software which only looks for "^From ", or less more than this.

Now, in the past, there was "MBOXO" and other solutions, but the
problem, as i see it, is also other software (qmail?), which
turned this to " rom" or maybe it was " From ", aka added a space.

In hindsight to this decade long and still existing problem of
"From_ quoting", only saying "should be encoded" is possibly
ambiguous?  And only with a real content-transfer-encoding it is
portably reversible.

Thanks and Ciao from Germany,

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

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