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Re: Converting mailbody to UTF-8 before encryption?



On Wednesday 26 May 2004 18.30, Holger Sesterhenn wrote:
> Hi,
>
> regarding to chapter 3.4 of the rfc2440bis-10 "the character set for
> text is the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode".
>
> Does this mean I have to convert e.g. the text body (text/plain) of a
> mail to UTF-8 before encryption?

Hmmm. I was going to say that PGP/MIME avoids this problem entirely by 
requiring all data to be ascii-only (using base64 or qp to achieve 
this). But looking through 3156, I see that
 - 8bit data for encryption-only messages is allowed and
 - it seems not to specify if text or binary mode should be used in 
encryption. (I did only quickly scroll through, so maybe I just missed 
that bit)

The kmail OpenPGP plugin seems to use binary mode (and even so, uses a 
7bit-clean encoding inside the encryption), so this would indeed not be 
an issue. Dunno about other implementations.

greetings
-- vbi

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