From: Johnathan Corgan <jcorgan@netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 94 14:14:25 PST
To: Adam Shostack <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Winsock & PGP Integration
Message-ID: <Chameleon.4.00.941213141328.jcorgan@.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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>	Seems to me that the UNIX model of building one mail transport
>instead of 20 is a good one.  If you seperate out the UA from the
>transport, you make it easy to fix or update the transport.

I agree.

>	So I would suggest, rather than hacking at Winsock and
>hoping to catch the right protocols, build a set of libraries that can
>be called by programs.  smtp.dll, for example, would be a mailer that
>any mail program could call.  nntp.dll would handle news, underneath
>all the various interfaces.  If you want to pretend to be premail, you
>do it in smtp.dll.

This is of course much closer to the ideal way of doing things.  However,
the original motivation for this project was that in order for all
existing Winsock based mail agents (except for Zmail, it looks like now)
to add crypto/anonymity to their functionality, some work has to be done
to change them.  The system I came up with to spoof Winsock would be
(hopefully!) transparent, in that it would work with _existing_ mailers
_today_.  To go the route you outlined, while in the long run a much more
sensible way of doing things, would require the same sort of effort on the
part of the current mail agents, i.e., they would need to change.

Your suggestion is one I would like to follow up on; in the mean time, I am
going to make an attempt at the spoofing idea.

>	The advantage to other programmers is that they no longer have
>to do the low level stuff that they had to before.  It allows
>programmers build whats interesting, namely, the interface & gizmos.

Hehe.  It's the user interface I hate doing the most!

>	Make the package do the user interface side of things, and
>make a seperate package to do the network protocols.  Makes building,
>testing, and changing things a lot easier.  And while you're at it,
>store all of your files as text.  :)

Nah.  Variable bit sized binary records work well enough :)

=======================================================================
Johnathan Corgan       "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"
jcorgan@netcom.com                       -Isaac Asimov
PGP Public Key:        http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html
Or send email to:      pgp-public-keys@pgp.ai.mit.edu Subj: GET jcorgan
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