As a liaison to the user community in the companies I deal with who do
not have the MIME-intelligent mailers widely deployed/used, I
see requiring MIME as an added obstacle for deploying security services
to e-mail.
But no one is requiring MIME for deployment of security services! RFC 1421 et
al still exist, and are still the standard for deploying PEM in non-MIME
environments. Nothing has changed in that regard. The only thing that will
change is that it will be possible to deploy email security services in MIME
environments as well as non-MIME environments.
Let me repeat for clarity here: MIME/PEM does nothing to restrict the set of
environments in which PEM can be deployed, only to expand it. Non-MIME
environments are untouched by the proposal.
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation