The OpenPGP mail and news header

What Is This?

This page contain information about our (that is, Atom Smasher and Simon Josefsson) attempt to get an OpenPGP mail/news header standardized. A simple example e-mail to illustrate the idea:

From: simon@josefsson.org To: someone@example.org OpenPGP: id=B565716F; url=http://josefsson.org/key.txt Hi there!

If that is just gibberish to you, you are likely not the intended audience for this page.

Please send feedback to Atom or Simon. Or both.

This work is sponsored by Simon Josefsson Datakonsult. If you need commercial help with utilizing this technology, or have a related project that you want help with, please feel free to contact me. If you find my work in this area useful, also please consider making a donation. No amount is too small!

The Document

draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header.txt, live text version. [ Diff compared to last published version]
draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header.xml, live xml source.
draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header.html, live html version.
The -06 document [ Diff compared to -05]
The -05 document [ Diff compared to -04]
The -04 document [ Diff compared to -03]
The -03 document [ Diff compared to -02]
The -02 document [ Diff compared to -01]
The -01 document [ Diff compared to -00]
The -00 document
Updated pre-draft specification.
Initial pre-draft specification.

Resources

IESG I-D Status Tracker.
tools.ietf.org draft viewer.

Background and Related Work

Discussion of this document happen in several places:

Software with support of the header:

Gnus
Enigmail (see documentation related to the OpenPGP header)
SquirrelMail (the PGP plugin)

If you know of more applications, please let me know.

If you are curious what it means to implement this document, here are some ideas:

Treat presence of the OpenPGP header as meaning that the sender support PGP/MIME, even if the message is not signed or encrypted.
Automatically adding the header if the user configured the MUA with her OpenPGP key ID.
Make the URLs within OpenPGP headers clickable, to download the key from the URL, and import it into the PGP implementation.
To add a "Secure reply" button, that uses the Key ID information in the header, to make a signed/encrypted reply to a message.

If you have other ideas on how you can make use of the OpenPGP: header, let me know!

Timeline

2008-05-20: Submitted updated -06 version to address comments received from Alfred Hoenes.
2008-04-15: Submitted updated -05 version.
2008-04-08: Received AD review comments from Tim Polk (that was quick!).
2008-04-07: Requested review from appsarea.
2008-04-04: Tentative AD assigned.
2008-04-03: Approached ADs to sponsor document.
2008-04-02: Submitted updated -04 version.
2008-02-23: Submitted updated -03 version.
2005-09-23: Submitted updated -02 version.
2005-08-02: Gave presentation at IETF 63.
2005-05-20: Submitted updated -01 version.
2005-01-07: Draft -00 published.
2004-08-11: Updated rought draft.
2004-08-10: Initial rought draft outline, by Atom.

Copying Conditions

The copying conditions for RFCs apply, of course. However, beyond that, the essential parts of the document is also available under the following, less restrictive, license.

	Copyright (C) 2004, 2008 Atom Smasher
	Copyright (C) 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 Simon Josefsson

	Regarding this entire document or any portion of it, the
	authors makes no guarantees and is not responsible for any
	damage resulting from its use.  The authors grants irrevocable
	permission to anyone to use, modify, and distribute it in any
	way that does not diminish the rights of anyone else to use,
	modify, and distribute it, provided that redistributed
	derivative works do not contain misleading author or version
	information.  Derivative works need not be licensed under
	similar terms.