-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ietf-mailsig(_at_)mail(_dot_)imc(_dot_)org [mailto:owner-ietf-
mailsig(_at_)mail(_dot_)imc(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of Dave Crocker
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 10:27 AM
To: Robert Barclay; 'ietf-mailsig'
Subject: one more time: agreeing on the basic goal of MASS
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 09:49:33 -0700, Robert Barclay wrote:
While in many cases these might be identical my interest is less in
transfer service introduction than in content authorization.
what you are saying sounds exactly like the goal of pgp and s/mime.
in
the strongly hopeful belief that that you do not mean for us to pursue
alternatives to pgp or s/mime, i'll ask you to clarify.
Sorry I have attempted to describe exactly my goals on various threads
previously and was a little imprecise above. To be more specific I would
say that my goal for this service is to provide a mechanism for the
domain of a message author to provide an assertion that they authorized
the sending of a specific message. This is similar but not identical to
the goal of PGP and S/MIME.
There are also some other goals that I think make this different than
PGP or S/MIME. For example I think it is a goal of this system to avoid
impacting the MUA display while for S/MIME and PGP the goal is
specifically to display the authentication to MUA's. The MASS format
overcomes an extremely common objection I have heard from financial
service companies to S/MIME deployment which is that changing their
expected message format (especially by adding attachments) makes their
messages less trusted rather than more.
i note you use the term 'transit service' rather than 'transit'. i
have
been making a distinction between mechanisms that pertain to the
transfer
channel (service), versus mechanisms that are applicable during the
time
of transit but are not related to the channel, per se.
Given the above definitions I may have misunderstood your original
email. I'll need to think about that a bit. I will use the above
definitions (and try to avoid creating new terminology) from now on.
Robert