415083 - Thunderbird should do a better job of ignoring PGP signatures

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Security: OpenPGP, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Thunderbird does not support verification of PGP signatures (without Enigmail). This is fine. However, when a PGP-signed message arrives via a mailing list with the signature as an attachment, you get the effect shown in the attached screenshot.

One of the attachments is a signature and the other is the list footer, which is appended as a second part because the list software realises the message is signed. Thunderbird displays the second attachment inline.

This is sub-optimal for several reasons:

- The message is marked in the thread pane as "having an attachment", when really it doesn't in any meaningful sense. This makes it harder to find a particular important message which has a real attachment.

- The attachment pane appears, making the message pane smaller, which is distracting and useless.

Suggestion: Thunderbird should recognise PGP signatures sufficiently (presumably by MIME type) to ignore them when:

- calculating whether to put a paperclip on the message in the thread pane
- calculating whether to show the attachment pane or not.

This behaviour may need to be disableable by Enigmail, perhaps with a pref.

Gerv

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Attachment: Screenshot of the problem

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

The mime type for those should be application/pgp-signature.

Comment 4

[John Drinkwater (:beta)]

Slightly stagnant bug…

Would be nice if PGP blocks and mailing list footers didn’t trigger the attachment flag / icon / list, but I can understand why preventing footers doing so would be hard.

Comment 5

[Till Schäfer]

This bug is related to some enigmail issues about signature hiding: http://sourceforge.net/p/enigmail/bugs/206/?page=0

That means this bug, becomes even more important as enigmail is not hiding the attachements either.

Comment 6

[Kai Engert (:KaiE:)]

We'd have to check if this bug is still relevant, now with OpenPGP implemented.

It might be relevant for downstreams that disable the OpenPGP feature.

Comment 7

[u677327]

The bug is still relevant with OpenPGP implemented, the PGP signature shouldn't be treated as an attachment.

Comment 8

[Kai Engert (:KaiE:)]

(In reply to Kai Engert (:KaiE:) from comment #6)

It might be relevant for downstreams that disable the OpenPGP feature.

We no longer allow disabling the OpenPGP feature.

Current Thunderbird treats PGP attachments correctly, I think this bug is now WFM.