Information needed - ash

[Alexander Kriegisch]

Dear John,

with all due respect, you are talking nonsense. Let me explain why:

  a) If you have read my e-mail carefully, I cannot just get what you
call "a proper mail client" because on iOS the mail client cannot be
changed by design. Please tell Apple instead of lecturing me. I use my
iPad for business reasons as well as privately whenever I am on the road
and even at home. I write to many mailing lists. On none except this one
I have ever had any issues with Apple Mail.

  b) I have mentioned I prefer text mail myself, but still HTML is a
very old standard even for e-mails. It is by no means unsafe if you just
use what you like to call a proper mail client. I am back home now and
writing this with Thunderbird. TB is configured not to display inline
images, but just basic HTML, which works just fine.

  c) Last, but not least I checked my outgoing mail and found out that
the MIME content is perfectly okay. It sent the message like this (only
quoting content types):

Content-Type: multipart/signed
    Content-Type: multipart/alternative
        Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
        Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    Content-Type: application/pkcs7-signature; name=smime.p7s

As you can see, Apple Mail sends HTML content in an alternative ASCII
representation. So the problem was not the message, but that the mailing
list processor cannot understand proper S/MIME messages and just throws
the main part away, storing the S/MIME certificate as a rather pointless
(as in content-less) attachment.

As I said: Admins, please fix the mailing list setup. If you need proof
for what I just said, I can easily send you the full original MIME
message including headers and all.

Kind regards
--
Alexander Kriegisch
http://scrum-master.de


John Spencer, 25.10.2013 18:32:
> Alexander Kriegisch wrote:
>> The attachment, as can be seen from your quote, seems to be just
>> the signature, not the text itself. So if only the signature was
>> scrubbed, how can the body text vanish? I can even download the
>> attachment and open it with an application clearly showing that it
>> is just the signature.
>> 
>> The body text might be in HTML, a fact which cannot be influenced
>> on iOS,
> 
> you should get a proper mail client then. sending html mails is
> forbidden on almost any maillist for good reasons, but mainly because
> it's not possible to display them correctly without a huge bloated
> html parser, which imposes a serious security threat.
> 
>> especially if you copy and paste formatted text from a web site. I
>> do prefer plain text when working with desktop e-mail clients on
>> Windows or Linux, but hey, this is 21st century and HTML e-mail
>> bodies should be permitted. I even switched off S/MIME signing for
>> this e-mail account on iOS in order to avoid problems with this
>> list. My clients require me to send them signed and/or encrypted
>> messages though, and again iOS Mail does not allow case by case
>> (de)activation of S/MIME. It can only be configured globally per
>> e-mail account. So I figure this mailing list should gracefully
>> handle messages like mine. HTML messages are not exotic at all.
>> Neither is S/MIME, both standards specified in RFCs.
>> 
>> Thank you

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