From: Alan Barrett <barrett@daisy.ee.und.ac.za>
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 94 02:11:32 PDT
To: Ray <rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu>
Subject: PGP-MIME
In-Reply-To: <9404060815.AA28162@geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.3.89.9404061007.A931-0100000@newdaisy.ee.und.ac.za>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Ray <rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu> said:
> Two problems instantly jumped out at me when reading the MIME
> documents:
>
> 1) more than 2-level encodings are not supported (no recursion)

Why is this a problem?  A MIME "Content-Transfer-Encoding" context is
a reversible transformation that is made to permit binary or other
non-email-friendly data to be carried in an email-friendly form.  Once
you have performed the encoding once, the result is email-friendly, so
there is usually no need to emcode it again.  Note that MIME places no
restrictions on the nesting of multipart messages; it merely requires
that the content-transfer-encoding be applied only at the innermost
levels of the nesting.

> 2) no application/viewpgp or transfer-encoding: pgp type

I have been trying, on and off, for about two years to persuade the PGP
folk to design a suitable MIME interface for PGP, modelled as closely
as reasonable on the ongoing PEM-MIME work.  Nobody ever seems to be
interested in that, but several folk have come up with their own ad-hoc
methods.  You could come up with your own ad-hoc method, or adopt one
of the others, or design something that is compatible with the PEM-MIME
stuff.  If anybody is interested in designing a PGP-MIME encapsulation
that is compatible (or nearly compatible) with PEM-MIME, I volunteer to
help.

--apb (Alan Barrett)