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From: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>
To: Notmuch Mail <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
Subject: Safe and useful handling of "Mixed Up" mangled messages
Date: Tue, 28 May 2019 18:54:48 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190528225452.17550-1-dkg@fifthhorseman.net> (raw)

I've documented an unfortunate MTA habit over in
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dkg-openpgp-pgpmime-message-mangling-00#section-4.1
which i've named "Mixed Up" mangling.  In particular, popular versions
of Microsoft Exchange take a multipart/encrypted e-mail and transform
it unaccountably to multipart/mixed.

While the right thing to do long term is to get a fix for those MTAs
(which i'm also working on, elsewhere), even if we succeed in doing
that, messages that have already been mangled by them will live on in
our mailboxes forever.

What follows is a series of patches that lets a notmuch user deal with
any message mangled in this particular form in a sensible way.  In
particular, they should be able to decrypt the message correctly
despite its nonstandard structure.  This represents a deviation from
standard MIME handling procedures, but i believe it is a safe
deviation, and a useful one.

The test case included in this series should be sufficient to show the
problem specifically, but if anyone wants to receive encrypted e-mail
from me that demonstrates the problem to their personal key, i can
provide.  Please let me know by replying off-list and making sure i
know your OpenPGP key fingerprint.

If anyone has examples of other common, detectable, and repairable
message manglings, please let me know.  I'd be happy to add them to my
documentation of this sort of thing at least, and if we can fix them
up for notmuch users, even better.

All the best,

    --dkg

             reply	other threads:[~2019-05-28 22:55 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-05-28 22:54 Daniel Kahn Gillmor [this message]
2019-05-28 22:54 ` [PATCH 1/4] test: add test for "Mixed-Up Mime" message mangling Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2019-05-28 22:54 ` [PATCH 2/4] util/crypto: identify and repair "Mixed Up" mangled messages Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2019-05-30  2:18   ` Rollins, Jameson
2019-05-30 16:46     ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2019-05-30 17:01       ` Rollins, Jameson
2019-05-28 22:54 ` [PATCH 3/4] index: repair "Mixed Up" messages before indexing Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2019-05-28 22:54 ` [PATCH 4/4] cli/show: show repaired form of "Mixed Up" mangled messages Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2019-05-30  2:08   ` Rollins, Jameson
2019-05-30  2:09     ` Rollins, Jameson
2019-05-30 16:47       ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2019-05-30 17:06         ` Rollins, Jameson
2019-05-28 22:58 ` Safe and useful handling " Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2019-05-29 19:37   ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2019-05-30  2:21     ` Rollins, Jameson
2019-05-30 17:30       ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor

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