Re: Proposed Proposed Statement on e-mail encryption at the IETF

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 10:11 AM, Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> Hiya,
>
> On 02/06/15 14:44, Joe Abley wrote:
>
> > Note that this is not an attempt to start a conversation about
> > whether PGP is usable, or whether S/MIME is better. I will fall off
> > my chair in surprise if it doesn't turn into one, though.
>
> We have a list for such discussion [1] if folks feel the need.
> And I know PHB has an interesting idea to try to merge the two
> in terms of message formats. I'm not sure that's feasible but
> discuss on [1] if you feel the need. And please don't have that
> discussion here unless there's a reason for it to be here and
> not there:-)
>

Actually merge the two as far as the user is aware.

Obviously, the more components are shared, the easier things become for
implementations. But adding message formats is not the hard part. I'll
probably have something for endymail next week.


The bigger issue for me is 'mailing list'. I can easily write a protocol
for an end to end secure collaborative forum as a Web Service but there is
no way that I expect to do anything useful with legacy SMTP infrastructure
as the transport.

SMTP sucks as a mailing list protocol.


What we need is a return to something that is a bit more like NNTP which
began life as an attempt to make mailing list interactions more efficient.