Hi All - Time for me to weigh in on the MIME (and MH) side.
I must ask what makes you think that there are (and will be) more PEM
installations today, and tomorrow, than MIME installations.
(Will-be's are such fun;-)
There are three MIME implementations (count them: From MRose,
Borentein, Crispin) openly available and deployed, which are already
exchanging MIME mail, and rumor has at least 11 vendors are in the
process of product development.
I don't think that PEM has this much going for it. MIME is also being
developed for non-unix systems, et al.
And now for a new issue, which I have quietly raised in the past, but
which has gotten no attention that I can detect, and I work with a
primary point of detection. Now I will make noise about it.
The Flagship PEM Implementation is coded to be an add-on to MH. There
has been no contact between TIS PEM folk, and the MH distribution
control person (John Romine <JRomine(_at_)ics(_dot_)uci(_dot_)edu>).
Since PEM/MH has been under development, many changes have been made
to the official MH distribution, including MIME by MRose. It is
really going to be interesting when PEM finally arrives as a set of
patches to an obsolete version of MH;-).
I suggest that you contact John Romine now, and make some agreements
about what is coming down here. John has extremely limited resources,
and is already overwhelmed by the MIME developments. Adding in PEM
stuff that does not interwork with MIME is going to be difficult at
best, and it will be difficult for the entire MH community. Someone
should probably provide some resources.
I strongly suggest that you not simply sweep this whole issue under
the carpet.
I had always thought that PEM and MIME were developed to interwork.
It comes to me a quite a shock to see that they do not, and that PEM
folk do not seem too see much reason to make them interwork.
Tsk, tsk...\Stef