From: pfarrell@cs.gmu.edu (Pat Farrell)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 93 10:29:30 PST
To: jim@tadpole.com
Subject: Re:  Rational PC mail , was Re: PGP on BBS
Message-ID: <9301261824.AA23577@cs.gmu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Jim,

While serial ports do lose characters, especially if you don't have
a 16550afn serial chip, I don't see this as a major hassle. In a pure
DOS space, you really arn't likely to lose the characters, and this
is the initial space of NUpop. With Windows, you have to learn to play
with the priorities to make it work well, or get one of the intellegent
serial driver DLLs that make it transparent.

It is possible that the authors of the NUpop document don't worry too
much about single character dropouts. There is plenty of redundancy in
english. PGP will complain, but I can see retransmitting a message
half a dozen times to get it thru cleanly will lose.

I never allow my private key anywhere near a serial port. The public keys 
are checksummed, so it is easy to see that a character is wrong.

I'd love to be able to use CSLIP. We (a bunch of folks on this campus) have
just convinced the admin to allow POP services. It will take a while before
we can convince them to allow SLIP, CSLIP, and PPP. In the meantime,
I'll happily live with NUpop's serial support.

Pat