[James M. Galvin]

At 8:55 PM 2/22/96, Raph Levien wrote:
>MOSS is dead, long live MOSS
>----------------------------
>
>   There were five contenders on the field going into the day, and two
>and a half at the end. MOSS was one of the casualties. A lot of us
>were sorry to see it go, but eliminating candidates has got to happen
>if we're going to have interoperation.
>   It's hard to say exactly what went wrong. MOSS had many advantages,
>and was a nice, clean, pretty standard. I think what doomed it was the
>lack of a good implementation.
>   Even though MOSS is no longer considered a serious contender, one
>piece of it is still very much alive: the multipart/signed message
>format. At the end of the day, there was strong, nearly unanimous
>consensus that multipart/signed should be recommended as the signed
>message format for _all_ of the email encryption protocols.

I debated about responding since you are entitled to your opinion.  After
thinking about it for a while I decided I need to say a little something.

It's my impression that MOSS suffered from lack of representation at this
workshop.  I got that view from at least 6 different people, so I believe
it to be true.  That said, I think it's unfair to declare its demise.

Further there is a good implementation of MOSS.  It was even announced at
the workshop.  Did you miss it?  TIS has done an implementation that is
available for anonymous FTP, albeit only within the US.  It's integrated
with MH, not the most favored mail user agent, but the current version has
shell scripts that perform minimal MIME functions to facilitate integration
with other agents.

Finally, multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted are not MOSS.  They are a
framework independent of any particular secure email technology.  True,
MOSS depends on them, but I regard that as a feature not a bug.

Jim

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
James M. Galvin                                               galvin at eit.com
VeriFone/EIT, PO Box 220, Glenwood, MD 21738                 +1 410.795.6882