Am Montag, den 28.02.2005, 15:35 -0800 schrieb "Hal Finney":
One other example where Partitioned Encoding is often the best encoding to
use is when sending PGP email to mobile devices. Because the two primary
standard formats for secure email, PGP/MIME and S/MIME, encrypt the entire
body of an email including attachments as one part, a mobile device is
prevented from downloading only specific segments of the message which
can be very desirable in low-bandwidth scenarios.
Thats current practice but you make it sound as if its required by the
standard. From my reading of RFC3156, it is not. While the
"multipart/encrypted" part has to have exactly one encrypted subpart, it
may occur several times in any given message.
Both approaches have their drawbacks -- its certainly more telling to
have every attachment encrypted seperately and its also more work for
the handling application. In any case, its hard to tell what will be
more appropriate for the recipient. However, advocating a non-MIME
format because of assumptions about the recipient seems ill-advised to
me.
Instead of putting in a notation requesting "partitioned", you might
request the "other way" of packaging a MIME-message just as well.
If, however, you want to document "partitioned" purely as a backwords-
compatibility thing, please don't put in language that makes it sound
like it might be a good idea for future use.
Sorry, but I've had one too many inline-PGP vs. PGP/MIME discussions to
stay calm here ;-)
regards
--
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff