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Are we interesting in becoming a Working Group?

1997-01-16 10:45:02
Greetings again. I'm pretty surprised at the lack of discussion on this
list, even after I proposed the first cut of a WG charter. About 125 people
have signed up to be on this mailing list, and there were certainly lots of
people in the room for the SMIME BOF in San Jose last month.

Without a Working Group, it will be harder to move SMIME into full IETF
specification, which is the stated intention of RSA. There are still some
tough issues to resolve, such as default choices for encryption algorithm
and the extension mechanism. At the BOF, there were many comments about
changes people wanted to see in the current SMIME spec, and there should be
a forum for that kind of discussion.

Further, only one of the four documents needed to turn this into a full
spec has been submitted to the IETF. Having a Working Group with a document
editor and chairman could help change this and get the process moving.

Of course, if no one is interested in doing the work in the Working Group,
it shouldn't form. However, given the great interest in San Jose and the
general industry desire to not have more than one email security protocol
(PGP/MIME is already an Experimental RFC), I think things should get moving.

Again, please take a look at the rough proposed charter I suggested, and
please feel free to make comments and criticisms here on the mailing list.
You can find my proposed charter in the mailing list archive at
<http://www.imc.org/ietf-smime/mail-archive/0003.html>.

--Paul E. Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium



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