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Comment by sweis | Hacker News Reader

Hi Chris. I worked on this and want to diagnose your server error.

When you decrypted from the command line, did you notice the plaintext blob preceding the HTML message content? Look for "Content-Type: text/plain;" and see if there is an unmodified verification URL there.

You might have only noticed the HTML one, which will be a pain to cut & paste. If it's still broken, please contact me.

Incidentally, I've been using both GPGTools/Mail.app and Gmail/Mailvelope without trouble. The latter doesn't open clicked links in a new tab, though. I've had to "Copy as" and paste in another tab.

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The server error is turns out to be relatively simple: urlview was picking up the plain-text version, which wraps the URL in square brackets:

[https://www.facebook.com/…/publickey/verify/?e=1&fp=…&ext=…&...]

The regex which urlview uses includes the final bracket, which causes the error. Once I removed it, I successfully validated the key.

It'd probably be best to put the URL on its own line but if not, RFC 2396 recommends using angle brackets – see “Recommendations for Delimiting URI in Context” in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt.

Thanks, I noticed the square brackets as well. We'll look into it.

Great, thanks!

I just went through and installed GPGTools for mac mail, and installed the key into facebook with no issues. (Well I copied just the 'random' set of numbers and the fb site told me to include a bit more of the header/footer of the key ). ] It all seems to work (perhaps they fixed the issue?)

... the challenge now is how will my email come through on iOS!? Any recommendations for that? I saw https://ipgmail.com/

iPGmail works, but it's a somewhat cumbersome solution.

The lack of a decent iOS mail client with GPG support is somewhat of a show stopper for me.

The point is that somebody shouldn't have to come in and diagnose the server error.

Yes, that's the point with all software. Everyone would love not ever getting errors and issues. But, just like with all other software out there, there will inevitably be bugs and corner cases which have to be diagnosed. I'd prefer someone from the product team actually caring about this and helping out rather than no support offered whatsoever, which is closer to the norm for big companies.

It is the first day of availability of this service, so it might be possible to find ways to improve its reliability and usefulness, even if you're kind of skeptical of PGP's design overall.

I agree with the general intent but since something broke, +1 to sweis for trying to fix it.

This is such a typical HN negative comment. Obviously the point is for there to be no bugs - any other extremely obvious things you would like to state?

People post things on here and simply get attacked, even if they're trying to do good and improve like OP for this thread is. It's people like you who drive others away from this site through your constant "this sucks, that sucks" mindset.

OP's comment is intended to tell us that This Shit Is Broken for him, and clearly for other users as well. OP is not requesting tech support. As nice as sweis is for offering support, he fails to acknowledge that solutions such as this one are simply not ready for most users from a UX perspective.

Reinforcing this point to sweis is not a negative comment. It is a comment you do not like. There is a difference.

Show me software that has been released with 0 bugs. This is part of what makes the HN community so great, being able to interact with real people who work on the topics being discussed.

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