Re: [openpgp] "OpenPGP Simple"

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

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 6:51 PM, Christoph Anton Mitterer <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Tue, 2015-03-17 at 10:30 -0400, Phill wrote:
> > Do not build OpenPGP around assumptions based on SMTP continuing
> > forever.
> +1, especially since I there are still many people here mentioning
> mail/SMTP and their restrictions/issues/problems quite often.
>
> A future OpenPGP (core) standard should try to avoid solving the
> issues/limitations of any other standard/protocols.
>
>
> That being said, I also don't like the idea of mail header
> signing/encryption.
> It's simply not OpenPGP's task and one should rather create an amendment
> for the mail standards or MIME which describes how an OpenPGP
> signed/encrypted headers would be embedded in an mail.
>

I think that it is now widely agreed that if SMTP was to be revised, it
would be separated into two layers with the message routing headers in one
section and the content meta-data in another.

Subject, To, From, Content-Type, etc. are all content headers. They have
nothing to do with SMTP. They are only used by the MUA.

As a general rule, if a fix works for S/MIME and OpenPGP, then we can
probably be fairly confident it will work for SMTPvNext as well.