Re: What real users think [was: Re: pgp signing in van]

> To be clear, what I would like to see in an MUA that addresses the use case 
> Brian described is that it is just a new mime encoding that allows a message to 
> be pieced together from a collection of signed attachments.   So in this 
> message, the mail would be encoded as two parts. The first would be the 
> complete message you wrote, with its signature.   The second would be the text 
> I have written here.   The quoted text above would be represented as a 
> reference to the attached message.
>
> This should be very easy to accomplish in the UI—the UI should look exactly 
> like the current UI.   It's just a tweak to how copy, cut and paste work.
>
> There's no reason to get rid of MIME—I think it's a pretty good solution.   I 
> mentioned the other solutions not because I prefer them but because they exist and do 
> demonstrate that replacements for IETF standards can and do catch on in the 
> marketplace, and that we ought not to just be smug about how great SMTP, RFC822 and 
> MIME are and pretend that we don't have competition.
S/MIME handles this case pretty well, but I've never seen anything other 
than a list manager such as Mailman wrap signed parts together.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for 
Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature