From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 95 12:44:21 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: MOSS [IETF privacy-enhanced mail, modified for MIME] now available
In-Reply-To: <9509132335.AA05053@sulphur.osf.org>
Message-ID: <199509141944.UAA22502@gizmo.lut.ac.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Rich Salz writes:

| >From pem-dev-request@neptune.tis.com Wed Sep 13 19:27:35 1995
| Message-Id: <9509132011.AA19261@tis.com>
| Reply-To: James M Galvin <tismoss-support@TIS.COM>
| To: "MOSS.Announce.List":;, tis.com@TIS.COM
| Subject: ANNOUNCE: TIS/MOSS Version 7.1

[...]

| 3
| Q: How does MOSS compare to PGP and PEM?
| 
| PGP can provide the same services but since it is not integrated with
| MIME the interpretation of the protected content is necessarily user
| controlled.  Note, however, that MIME can carry a PGP object.

Just wondering - is anyone working on a profile for PGP under MOSS
and/or the multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted body parts ?

Whether or not they are, it would be useful to have a de-facto
standard for the use of PGP with current MIME implementations.  I
recall there was a draft RFC by Nathaniel Borenstein which dealt
with this, but it was withdrawn to leave the way clear for MOSS ?

Why bother ?  Well, there are lots of mailers out there with "some"
MIME support - enough for launching a helper application to read
and perhaps compose (say) application/pgp, but not nearly enough to
handle MOSS.  I'm thinking about commercial offerings for the likes
of MacOS, DOS, and Windows in particular.  It seems like a really 
neat hack to use the MIME support to bring PGP in by stealth, but
perhaps most of the implementations Out There are too crippled ?

Over to you... :-)

Martin