In <TCPSMTP.17.4.3.0.48.36.2780269260.1593210@nycmetro.com>, on 04/02/97 at 11:48 PM, harka@nycmetro.com said:
On another mailing-list, there has been a lengthy discussion going on about encrypting the list-traffic or not. Although I personally agree, that encrypting a public mailing list is kind of useless I would like to know from a technical perspective if PGPdomo supports _both_ PGP and plain-text simultaneously on the same mailing list (if no public key available, send plain-text, otherwise encrypt). Also, considering the time it takes to encrypt/sign a message for each individual user (assuming they use pgp), isn't that too much overhead for the list-server, when we deal with a few hundred people and maybe traffic like on cypherpunks?
Any experiences from PGP-Domo users/admins would be greatly appreciated.
I haven't used PGP-Domo but I have run a PGP mailing list using my own software for OS/2. You can cut down on some of the overhead by encrypting the message with multiple keys but this increases messages size. If you have a large # of subscribers you may wish to break up your encryption into blocks, say 25 keys per message. I think it will depend on your system on how may subscribers & messages you could handle on a daily basis. Say a user base of 1000 subscribers with 100 messages/day that's 100,000 encryptions per day. While I think this would be doable on a PC you would have some serrious lag. For a large subscription base I would go to a digest format. This would cut down those 100 messages to say 5-10 digests. This would get you to 5-10,000 encryptions which would be much more doable. On the mailing list that I am running I only have 4-5 messages a day with a user base of ~130 so volume has not been a problem. :) -- ----------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. Finger whgiii@amaranth.com for PGP Key and other info -----------------------------------------------------------