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emailemail-attachmentspgp
Steve
Steve

Reputation: 1736

Attachment extension names in PGP encrypted email

I develop the open source library django-email-extras which allows you to add email addresses and their associated PGP keys to the database, which will then encrypt those emails if they're sent to, including attachments.

When I originally developed it a few years ago, I think I was using Outlook with a PGP plugin, and decrypting attachments worked fine without any special handling. I've since had a report that with certain software, the attachments require an .asc extension in order to be correctly decrypted.

My questions is, is the .asc extension for encrypted attachments a standard that I should add handling for across the board, or is this something that's email client specific and therefore should be configurable per user?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 479

Answers (1)

Nickolay Olshevsky
Nickolay Olshevsky

Reputation: 14160

PGP-MIME standard (RFC 3156) doesn't tell anything about attachment extensions. Probably, this is requirement/limitation of third-paty software which gets some file parameters from extension (.asc is usually used for armored PGP messages), and then feeds attachment to GnuPG.

Upvotes: 2

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