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)