Gatewaying of S/MIME objects between X.400 and SMTP?

Hi,

over the last few months I've occasionally run into people who have a
need to codify how to move S/MIME signed and/or encrypted objects between
X.400 users and SMTP/Internet Mail users.

There appears to be largely two schools of thought:

- Make Internet Mail the "primary domain of definition", and use
  encapsulation as described in MIXER to move stuff into X.400.
  This is possibly the only thing that works for "multipart/signed",
  but requires MIME smarts at the recipient end.

- Make CMS the "primary domain of definition", and choose whatever
  representation is most suitable for the native email system.
  This would be the S/MIME format in SMTP, and probably an FTAM or
  bilaterally-defined body part in X.400.
  This may work fine for encrypted S/MIME, and there's anecdotal
  evidence that some people are using it already.

If there's sufficient interest, and the answer isn't blindingly obvious
to all, we might think of working out an RFC that recommends how to do this.

I believe this is not something that is of wide enough interest to the
two mailing lists I'm targeting for discussion there, so I've created
a special mailing list for this subject.

To join: Send "subscribe" in the BODY of a message to

   smime-mixer-REQUEST(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no

to subscribe to this list.
Archives will be at http://www.alvestrand.no/archives/smime-mixer/ when
something is actually sent to the list.

Welcome!

               Harald T. Alvestrand

-- 
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Maxware, Norway
Harald(_dot_)Alvestrand(_at_)maxware(_dot_)no