Re: email standards

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

On 9/23/2014 1:08 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> I meant two secure email standards. Empirically we have two right now,
> S/MIME and PGP.
> 
> Since I was talking about security, I thought it was obvious from the context.


It wasn't.

And to be thorough, you also forgot PEM...


Anyhow, sometimes we need to let competitive efforts develop and then
let the market choose among them.  Artificially stifling serious
constituenies from pursuing credible alternatives is often poor
engineering and worse politics.


In this case, there really was significant effort to get some amount of
collaboration between the two groups -- the related MIME multipart
constructs were designed to allow some co-habitation -- but it didn't
get any traction.  (One of the groups was particularly political in how
it managed its activities, but neither group was all that flexible.)


FWIW, it's unlikely that the competition in this case has had anything
to do with the poor uptake of either mechanism.

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net