PEM could *never* do what I asserted, in my non-sensical comment.
Well, I managed to come up with a possible meaning for your comment that could
be accomplished in classic PEM: i.e., that a mail transfer agent could verify
the certification chains of the originator and/or recipient in order to make
routing policy decisions.
This is something that can be done with X.509 certificates and a PCA
hierarchy, and which could be useful. Given several recent threads, such a
comment actually makes some sense... It hadn't occurred to me that someone
would post an intentional non sequitur, so I tried to assign some relevant
meaning to it.
This just goes to show that the semantics of a message are by their very
nature subjective :).
Time to get on with implementing the damn thing - now that its
proven itself stable enough to intense academic scrutiny.
Indeed.
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation