Re: The Case Against MIME

[Ian Brown <I.Brown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > It isn't for "purity"; it is to make it easier for new
> > implementors to create compatible versions without
> > unnecessary impediments. They can obtain MIME toolkits
> > more easily than Armour ones. Or even just let mail
> > programs handle the encoding of the binary data.
> 
> Partdon me, this is not true.  The only difference between
> ASCII Armor and MIME's base64 are the armor header and the
> CRC.

I do know this. So a MIME toolkit writes armour headers and CRCs?

> To make 2.6 understand MIME encoded PGP messages,
> just use mmencode -u -b | pgp -f - it will work on unix
> systems; porting mmencode to other OS'es will be quite
> trivial.

An excellent reason for saying we *don't* need armour.

The difficulty is not in reading it but in *writing* it. We don't want
new implementations to have to mess around with armour headers and CRCs.

mmencode shows a way that even PGP 2.6 could be made to work with MIME
rather than armour.

Ian.