From: jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 94 14:54:56 PST
To: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Subject: Re: McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.
Message-ID: <ab1677b1020210049b1d@[132.162.201.201]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 5:27 PM 12/15/94, Timothy C. May wrote:
>For example, I could spend some number of hours switching from my
>current mail progam (elm) to some other editor which perhaps
>better-supported the MIME messages seen here. But if all I got for
>several hours of using, learning, and becoming comfortable with, say,
>"pine," was the ability to see an _italicized_ word, or a word in
>Cyrillic, then I would consider this a poor ROI.

Well, I certainly agree with you, and I expect most everyone else does too.
No one expects anyone to spend lots of time with minimal returns on that
time.
But the reason I think you are meeting so much animosity is because there
are lots of people here who think MIME is the solution to making encryption
easier to use.  Whether or not Joe Random User switches to a MIME compliant
app so he can see italicized words is irrelevant. But what _is_ relevant is
whether Joe Programmer writes his mail reader to be MIME compliant, and
specifically, writes it to appropriately deal with the
about-to-be-standardized PGP types.

We all agree that it's currently much too hard to deal with PGP on a
regular basis, for most people. Some people are satisfied with the tools
they have, but the vast majority of people either don't have access to
those tools, or dont' think the available tools are sufficient. It's not
currently easy to use PGP on a regular basis, and this is a big problem. A
lot of people are convinced that MIME is the solution to this problem, and
rightly so in my opinion.  And they take many of your comments to be
counter productive, in that we "should" be encouraging MIME, and we
"should" be excited about MIMEs possibilities in this area.

And of course people like MIME for other reasons too. But I don't think
anyone is trying to blame Tim C. May, or anyone else, for thinking the
current tools suck, and for not wanting to deal with MIME with the current
tools.  Everything is a cost benefit equation, and it's up to you to weigh
the costs and benefits.  But people see MIME as exciting technology, which
if properly implemented, can do lots of really cool things. Not the least
of which is make it easy/possible for mailers to deal with PGP correctly.

Steve Dorner, who writes Eudora, is working on a new version that will
interact with PGP transparently. He's been talking about it a bit on the
MCIP list, and I'm very excited about it. It should make using PGP with
Eudora incredibly easy.  And he's relying on MIME, and the incipient PGP
and encryption MIME standards, to make it work.