ietf-openpgp
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: The Case Against MIME

1997-11-19 10:42:54
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

In <347311A5(_dot_)2883320(_at_)cs(_dot_)ucl(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk>, on 11/19/97 
   at 11:19 AM, Ian Brown <I(_dot_)Brown(_at_)cs(_dot_)ucl(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk> 
said:

It isn't for "purity"; it is to make it easier for new
implementors to create compatible versions without
unnecessary impediments. They can obtain MIME toolkits
more easily than Armour ones. Or even just let mail
programs handle the encoding of the binary data.

Partdon me, this is not true.  The only difference between
ASCII Armor and MIME's base64 are the armor header and the
CRC.

I do know this. So a MIME toolkit writes armour headers and CRCs?

To make 2.6 understand MIME encoded PGP messages,
just use mmencode -u -b | pgp -f - it will work on unix
systems; porting mmencode to other OS'es will be quite
trivial.

An excellent reason for saying we *don't* need armour.

The difficulty is not in reading it but in *writing* it. We don't want
new implementations to have to mess around with armour headers and CRCs.

mmencode shows a way that even PGP 2.6 could be made to work with MIME
rather than armour.

What you are assuming is that all Open-PGP implementations will be using
MIME. Not only do I think that this will not be the case more improtantly
it SHOULD NOT be the case.

For the majority of e-mail messages that are currently generated there is
no reason to use MIME formatting including PGP formated messages!

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                 
       
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3a
Charset: cp850
Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000

iQCVAwUBNHMkqI9Co1n+aLhhAQGImgQAtf2qXxrf4D8iuNtKG5NRnjwBb9Sx2p+g
zGWlpKVrn6sAYBceut06x44JygFdeq6bxSCHwYra+tIOhJXRgV8TcQTzt5RAEzl0
+UO1LSYLmD0T0bTE6mSsHr32m1vPHFRmBoF7CQE6hOVAzqdp+UGWFPV99P+q65JR
E/Pxt6+L0w8=
=79vU
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----