pmcanon - put a news article in canonical format for signature checking
Pmcanon accepts an article from the named file (or standard input
if not specified), selects certain of the header fields, and performs certain
transformations intended to defeat unintentional mangling by news transport
programs. The resulting article is written to standard output, and is suitable
to have a PGP signature generated or checked for it.
The output produced consists (in order) of a sorted list, one per
line, of newsgroups; the From:, Subject:, and Message-ID: lines, and the
body of the article (everything after the first empty line). Other header
lines are discarded.
The body is further processed by deleting all blank lines,
deleting trailing whitespace on lines, prefixing lines beginning with
"--", "From", "Subject", and a single
"." with "- ", ">", ">"
and ".", respectively. These modifications are safe, in that an
article which has already had such modifications will fail to meet the
criterion to have them happen again. Thus what was used as input when a
signature was generated should still be the same when checked for validity,
even if some of these changes have happened along the delivery path.
pmapp(1), pmcheck(1), PGP manual.
Greg Rose, RoSecure Software.