Microsoft MUAs: PGP breakage and support for Disposition-Notification-To: headers
Access to a personal Win2K machine has afforded me the opportunity to see firsthand all of the horrible things that happen to my email when it leaves the warm embrace of Emacs/Gnus on my PC. I discovered, for instance, that Outlook Express 6 (but not Outlook proper, interestingly) not only fails to display digitally-signed messages properly (both signature and content show up as attachments to a blank message), but OE does the user the kind service of flagging both as potentially harmful code.
I am unable to wrap my brain around how the Microsoft engineers came up with that one. The authors of the Jargon File have made a convincing attempt to show that it wasn’t (as I’ve read) an attempt by Microsoft to convince their users that email formatted with free software is corrupt and virus-ridden.
Hanlon’s Razor prov.
A corollary of Finagle’s Law, similar to Occam’s Razor, that reads “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
It would be generous to think that the MS engineers simply didn’t read the relevant RFCs. But how on earth is it possible that they could get the feature right in Outlook (the PGP-signed message’s mail-envelope icon even has a tiny seal-of-validity on it), yet manage to break it in Outlook Lite?
Perhaps the breakage was intentional, but the Real Customers who actually buy Outlook wouldn’t stand for it, so they fixed it in Outlook Proper and left it broken in Plebeian Outlook. (How’s that for paranoid raving!).
I’ve digressed. The point of this post was to explain that Netscape Messenger 4.7, iPlanet Messaging Server, Outlook, and Outlook Express all, depending on configuration, ask users if they wish to send a message as requested in a “Disposition-Notification-To:” header. Netscape has it switched on (except for Bcc:’d mail, like mailing list messages) by default.
Adding the DNT header in Gnus is a simple matter of pushing
C-c M-n. Interestingly enough, Gnus doesn’t look for the
DNT header on incoming messages, so it won’t issue receipts for email
it receives: it only sends requests for receipts. (I suppose I could
code that feature myself. Perhaps this summer.)