Verifying your 8.02 Fifth Week Flag E-mail

If you receive a Fifth Week Flag in 8.02, it will be electronic mail with a digital signature, and it will look something like this:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

This is a sample 8.02 early warning message.  If it had been a real
message, it would have been mailed to the student and cc:ed to the
student's advisor and 8.02 Recitation Instructor.

[Instructions for authenticating this message are available at
http://web.mit.edu/acs/www/fwf/802.html]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2

iQCVAwUBOMkdpx7siEpD8VBdAQF1RgQAlUjXGCcpZYzzMV+kpd3el5h1N6oGRzAY
GVeBoQyP+Gh6yGuGLJdbei1MNb0wCUXLT6Nx6iQlY0WizeBFAgpJfpqn0WqW5qv/
yNnPktNfcfice316mOemCLVDnpRDiRKQ+ehzBb+q1Btx5576aqhAaJIBZemSrYAO
gbhRLWSrJ/0=
=XFXq
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

To verify that the message is valid, you may use the special "verify-message" command on Athena, as follows:

verify-message

to check the current message if you use mh commands (inc, scan, show, or xmh, exmh, etc.) to read your mail

verify-message <message-number>

to check a different message, substituting the message number for <message-number>

verify-message <file-name>

to check a message that you've saved to a file from any mail program, substituting the file name for <file-name>

You will get a report something like this:

Please make sure the following says the signature is good and that
the message is addressed to you.

Good signature from user "8.02 Course Administrators".
Signature made 2000/03/10 16:55 GMT

WARNING:  Because this public key is not certified with a trusted
signature, it is not known with high confidence that this public key
actually belongs to: "8.02 Course Administrators".

The message follows. Press ENTER to continue... 

...followed by the text of the message. You may safely ignore the WARNING in this case.