Author: intrigeri Date: To: The Tails public development discussion list Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] [review][website] #9356 warn about char encoding on
OpenPGP
Hi,
tl;dr: I don't think we need an actual reproducer to document this
widely known and understood problem.
sajolida wrote (08 Jun 2015 13:42:43 GMT) : > [...] I failed to reproduce the problem. I encrypted "á ô ü" in
> Tails OpenPGP Applet (both symmetrically and asymmetrically) and the
> result opened well in Tails OpenPGP Applet, on the `gpg` command
> line, and in Icedove.
The first two results are fully expected if both the sending side and
the receiving one are configured to use the same text encoding (and
Tails uses UTF-8 both for desktop apps and on the command line).
Regarding the third result, just curious (feel free to disregard, as
IMO it doesn't really matter, as explained below): how did you send
the email that you later opened with Icedove? With Icedove too, or
with another email client?
Anyway: the root cause of the problem is PGP/inline, and it's a real
one (as explained in the thread that lead to this bug being filed
IIRC, the sending MUA has no way to express what's the encoding of the
cleartext, because it only sees the ciphertext that's encoded in
US-ASCII). In some cases, and even possibly in the majority of cases,
it works because the receiving MUA's assumptions are correct, but it
cannot possibly *always* work because there's no robust way to
correctly guess the encoding of a bytestring in all cases.
I'm wrong, I'm sure dkg will happily correct me :)
