From: hal9001@panix.com (Robert A. Rosenberg)
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 95 21:03:02 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: S/MIME and the Future of Netscape
Message-ID: <v0213050aac3b0b3f670f@[166.84.254.3]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:27 7/24/95, Timothy C. May wrote:
>At 12:54 PM 7/23/95, Bob Snyder wrote:
>>tcmay@sensemedia.net said:
>>> With regard to SSL and Netscape not being open to outside developers,
>>> several leading e-mail outfits, including Qualcomm, Netscape,
>>> Frontier, etc., are working on an interoperable secure e-mail
>>> standard called "Secure/MIME," or "S/MIME."
>>
>>Do you have sources for this information?  MOSS is out there at least as a
>>Internet Draft, and possibly further along, and Steve Dorner of Qualcomm, the
>>original author of Eudora, is pretty active in the MIME community and I doubt
>>he would support a second MIME type to do the same thing...
>
>Some of you have expressed skepticism about the mention of "S/MIME."
[snip]

All MOSS does is designate the MIME Headers/etc to support Encrypting
and/or Signing MIME Parts. It says nothing as to how you do the Encoding or
create Signature - only how to package the two parts into a MIME format
once you have them. Thus S/MIME is/could-be an implementation of MOSS (as
would be a MUA that used the MOSS formats to package a PGP signature or
Encrypted Message).

For those who want to read the docs, just send this message:

>To: mailserv@ds.internic.net
>From: YOUR-ADDRESS-GOES-HERE
>
>ENCODING mime
>FILE /internet-drafts/draft-ietf-pem-mime-08.txt
>FILE /internet-drafts/draft-ietf-pem-sigenc-03.txt