Re: The Case Against MIME

["William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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In <347311A5.2883320@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, on 11/19/97 
   at 11:19 AM, Ian Brown <I.Brown@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

>> > 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.

What you are assuming is that all Open-PGP implementations will be using
MIME. Not only do I think that this will not be the case more improtantly
it SHOULD NOT be the case.

For the majority of e-mail messages that are currently generated there is
no reason to use MIME formatting including PGP formated messages!

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html                        
- ---------------------------------------------------------------

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