Attachment names

[JAta2]

Hi,

Thanks so much for SecuMail 2.2 with attachment support.  Overall I am very pleased. 

Hope you don't mind, but I do have an issue.  I can use SecuMail with attachments just fine on my iPhone - sending messages to and from myself work fine.  The problem is how a Windows 7 system running with Outlook/PGP 10.2 sees the attachments. PGP automatically decrypts the message including attachments via a proxy.  However, because of the name that Secumail originally gives the attachments, the decrypted attachments are not recognizable by the system.

For example:

I configure SecuMail to send email with attachments rather than inline.  If I encrypt the message and send, Outlook displayed 4 attachments.

1) Version.txt - I understand this, even PGP can do this
2) Untitled attachment 00016.txt - seems blank - maybe it's a blank line somewhere in the message that got encrypted as a separate attachment?
3) message (decrypted from message.asc) - the attachment is not recognized by the Windows system because it doesn't have a suffix.  If I save it to message.txt, I see the decrypted text inside it but one cannot just click on the attachment directly
4) Untitled attachment 00019.txt - contains the signature line that is appended to each outgoing message.

This does not seem intuitive and rather hard for PGP receipients to be able to decode.  Is there anything that can be done to make it more intuitive?  For example, if SecuMail named the attachment something like message.txt.asc rather than message.asc, it would have decrypted the attachment to message.txt which could be recognized.

Thanks,
John

[Ernesto]

Hi John.

Than you for the feedback. The reason we named the name the attachment "message.asc" has to do with compatibility reasons. PGP itself generates a Message.pgp file and a Version.txt file when in PGP/MIME mode.

What we might do in a future version is include an option to rename the attachment while in attachment-mode.

Now the reason you see that many attachments is that SecuMail doesn't have much control over the MIME contents of the outgoing mail. This is an iOS limitation and why we have to "fake" the PGP/MIME.
That said, there's two things you can do to minimize the number of attachments.

1) You can turn off generation of Version.txt from the SecuMail encrypt settings.
2) You can turn off the email signature globally from the Settings.app, in the "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" section.

I wish we could have more control over the email generation aspect, but right now we're just doing what we're allowed to do. As Apple gives us more control, we'll be happy to update SecuMail to use it.

Thanks again for the feedback and let me know if we can help you with anything else.

Regards,
Ernesto.

[JAta2]

Thanks so much for your reply.  I look forward to the new options.

Just a comment:

You wrote:

>> PGP itself generates a Message.pgp file and a Version.txt file when in PGP/MIME mode.

True, my understanding is that Message.pgp is a special case - the entire message along with attachments is encrypted/encoded in a single attachment named Message.pgp in PGP/Mime mode and when decrypted with the appropriate client replaces the entire mail message.  The normal case appears to be for any attachment to be decrypted into another attachment which message.asc seems to falls under.  I understand the limitations and constraints with iOS and am thankful to have what is there.  The ability to specify the attachment name I think would address the issue for me.  Thanks again for responding, I appreciate it.

-- John

[Ernesto]

Just a comment:

You wrote:
>> PGP itself generates a Message.pgp file and a Version.txt file when in PGP/MIME mode.

True, my understanding is that Message.pgp is a special case - the entire message along with attachments is encrypted/encoded in a single attachment named Message.pgp in PGP/Mime mode and when decrypted with the appropriate client replaces the entire mail message.

That's correct.

The normal case appears to be for any attachment to be decrypted into another attachment which message.asc seems to falls under.  I understand the limitations and constraints with iOS and am thankful to have what is there.  The ability to specify the attachment name I think would address the issue for me.  Thanks again for responding, I appreciate it.

I'll try to sneak that in for our next release.

Thanks again for the feedback.