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I've been following the discussion about AsciiArmour and MIME for a
while now, and I note some similarities with the storms of protest I
got when I started using PGP 5.0.
In an ever faster changing world of computers regular users of PGP
seem to be very reluctant to change anything. When something new
comes along (or threatens to come along as is the case here), PGP
users everywhere seem to reject it immediately. There are some people
who _still_ refuse to upgrade to version 5.0 because 'it sucks'. The
same argument seems to be applied to MIME here. This may be true, but
MIME is infinitely better than Yet-Another-Way-To-Encode-Things.
The defacto standard for sending anything but plain-text-English
emails is MIME. Ascii Armour is from the time that UUEncoding was the
hip thing. The mailreaders of 99% of the internet users today already
understand MIME, they don't understand AA, so adding support for
PGP/MIME to them should be trivial.
Of course there is a strong case for continuing support for AA
(backwards compatibility and all that), but the new standard should
not be based on it. It's ancient technology.
Alex Le Heux
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atrak: Don't tickle me while I'm thinking!