MOSS [IETF privacy-enhanced mail, modified for MIME] now available

Martin Hamilton martin at mrrl.lut.ac.uk
Thu Sep 14 12:44:21 PDT 1995



Rich Salz writes:

| >From pem-dev-request at neptune.tis.com Wed Sep 13 19:27:35 1995
| Message-Id: <9509132011.AA19261 at tis.com>
| Reply-To: James M Galvin <tismoss-support at TIS.COM>
| To: "MOSS.Announce.List":;, tis.com at 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with this, but it was withdrawn to leave the way clear for MOSS ?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







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