Of course, once any decryption or verification is performed, the resulting data must be displayed to the user. A future version of PGP will include a command line option that will guarantee that ALL output will be in MIME format, regardless of whether it was initially encrypted as MIME or text. It should be stressed that the format parameter is completely optional. Further, it is expected that a future release of PGP will make this parameter completely unnecessary for any desired functionality, by building knowledge about encapsulated MIME into the PGP data structures. No further MIME-related processing is called for after decryption.
Text is the default value of the format parameter.
However, it should be noted that the latter form is more explicit, and should be generated whenever an encrypting agent has definite knowledge that the data being encrypted are simply non-MIME text. That is, it should be inspected for Content-type, etc. and parsed recursively as a MIME entity. A user agent that so chooses may treat such entities specially, e.g. by providing the user with a special key-management interface. One area where MIME and PGP have redundant mechanisms is in the transformation of binary data into a mail-safe form. As it happens, these mechanisms are virtually identical, but are flagged in different manners.