Peter,
The question you asked was debated at the PEM WG meeting today
with mixed results. A contingent of attendees plans to press ahead
with deployment of 822-PEM while the details of MIME-PEM are worked
out. Other attendees indicated that they would not develop PEM in its
822 profile, preferring to wait for the MIME version. There is
agreement that MIME-PEM will provide many nice features and thus will
be more attractive in many respects. The group agreed to press ahead
on refining the MIME-PEM spec and urged everyone to review the next
verion and provide timely feedback in hope that the result might be
approved at the Amsterdam meeting.
It was observed that a MIME-PEM implementation, as currently
defined, requires the user to have a MIME compliant mailer plus
PEM-specific features. Thus the current proposal, if adopted as a
replacement for RFC 1421, would remove support for 822-PEM. This
proposal was not uniformly well received. As a counter, it was
suggested that MIME mailers, some of which include (vesitgial) support
for 934 boundary markers, might include support for 822-PEM in an
analogous fashion. There was substantial agreement that it would be a
bad idea to require gateways for MIME-PEM and 822-PEM interoperation,
but not agreement on how to avoid this problem.
A set of meeting minutes will follow early next week.
Steve