From: jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 94 16:15:08 PST
To: warlord@MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)
Subject: Re: extra dashes in PGP-related blocks?
Message-ID: <ab1296fc0802100434c8@[132.162.201.201]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 5:03 PM 12/12/94, Andrew Brown wrote:
>but is a remailer (or pgp) smart enough to take the output from checking
>a signature and run pgp over it again?  is it going to know to take something
>and pass it through pgp until pgp can't do anything with it any more? i think
>that's the problem that jrochkin was addressing.  he has a pgp encrypted
>message and then signs it and then wants to mail it to a remailer so that the
>remailer can decrypt the message but it won't ecause the encryption is
>nested...
>
>wasn't that it?

Well, no, not really.
My problem was that a user would send me their public key, inside of a
signed message, and the "BEGIN PUBLIC KEY" stuff would have the "- " on it.
Which means that before I can add it to my keyring, I've got to edit out
the extra "- "s, and then save it in a file, and then pass it through PGP,
instead of just passing the original message though PGP, or using the Mac
"copy" command on a part of the message and sending that through PGP.
Or someone sends me an encrypted address block inside a signed message, and
I've got to do the same before I can use it.

I now understand why PGP does what it does, but it's still a pain. Perhaps
the ideal mail reading program would run my incoming mail through PGP
before I even saw it, so I wouldn't have this problem. Well, actually not.
My ideal mail reader would check the signatures before I saw them, but
would also leave them intact on the message, so I could re-check them
myself manually if I wanted.  Oh well.  It's not a limitation on
functionality of any kind, just on convenience.