On Tue, 2 Jun 92 16:34:31 PDT, Steve Dusse wrote:
Without nested encodings, there would be no natural way of indicating
WHAT was privacy-enhanced and therefore privacy-enhancement would
likely be limited to vanilla text.
Not true. You could apply PEM to objects besides text. PEM could be a new
transfer encoding, for example.
Also, there are plenty of
"security types" that believe that the structure/content-type of a
message may be as sensitive as the content of a message.
In such cases, you wouldn't be using distributed mail. Another way of putting
it is that kind of PEM is not very useful in a distributed mail environment,
because you are compelled to retrieve a great deal of data before you can be
away whether or not the data is useful.
There is a need for PEM, though, particularly with distributed mail, since
mail data is transferred in the clear otherwise.
I would like to see this all thought out a bit better.