Re: [smime] S/MIME publishing mailing list

Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Michael Ströder 
> <michael(_at_)stroeder(_dot_)com>
> wrote:
>
> > Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> > > At the moment all messages go over HTTP. I see no advantage to using SMTP
> > > for the purpose of managing certs and private keys. I am not aware of any
> > > modern Internet device that is not capable of doing HTTP. Why make things
> > > hard?
> > Call me old-fashioned. But still 100% of my sent and received e-mail
> > messages
> > are transported over SMTP (on some connections even using STARTTLS).
> > Trading
> > HTTP over SMTP does not gain anything.
> It gains a great deal of speed and removes many sources of instability and
> unreliability. Rather than being limited to a single request/response it is
> easy to make additional requests if warranted.
>
> The SMTP email infrastructure is horrible to work with.
As said I don't want to wait another 20 years before encrypting e-mails with a
new shiny HTTP-based infrastructure.

> There are corner cases everywhere and a large number of servers have idiot
> ideas about mangling messages.
I'm pretty sure that it would take many years before all implementation issues
in corner cases are sorted out when switching to HTTP.

> The objective is to distribute certs though, that is a problem HTTP is
> already designed to support and SMTP is not.
???

All the S/MIME enabled MUAs take the S/MIME cert from a signed e-mail
including the S/MIME capabilities. And yes, I know how to distribute certs via
HTTP and that could be a second option.

Ciao, Michael.

smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature

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