In message Sat, 12 Feb 1994 13:00:55 -0800, Peter shipley <shipley@merde.dis.org> writes:

This is why I email this list to encourage the use of MIME email headers with a MIME mailer (elm, pine, mh, Zmail etc..) when a person receives email, the mailer agent will invoke pgp automaticly thus reading encrypted email is a user transparent process.

Clearly MIME is a step in the right direction. And clearly MIME is steg friendly, who can tell a MIME encoded PGP message from a MIME encoded GIF file without looking at character frequencies, etc. (You _know_ that I'm going to lie about the MIME-Content-Type flag :-) But I haven't yet found a Windows PC client that will work without TCP/IP. Maybe I haven't looked hard enuff. Since 85% of all computers are shipped with Windows, "widespread use" means Windows (or Windoze for the cynics). I also don't know why the network vendors charge so much more for SLIP and/or PPP, but until IP is as cheap as async, there is a need for lower technology solutions. There are also some design questions that have to be addressed on the human interface side. For example, some folks strongly prefered not to receive encrypted mail, because they didn't work in an PGP friendly environment. So you need to have a client that is smart enuff to automatically encrypt to folks who control machines on the net, and not encrypt by default to folks using unsecure delivery such as netcom.com's vt100 based users. And you need a nice way to override the default. Clearly this information goes in the roledex that you keep with your client software. I mention it only so that folks realize that the simple publication of a PGP or RIPEM key does not indicate that a user is ready to receive all email encrypted. Solving these problems is exactly why we write code. Pat Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell@gmu.edu Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer>