Re: McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.

[mccoy@io.com (Jim McCoy)]

"Ishi" writes:
[...]
> (The MIME stuff I'm not saying shouldn't be used, just that some of
> us--perhaps most of us, is my hunch--will not be adopting the latest
> bleeding edge technology. The comments here about Sun and Microsoft
> not properly--or at all--supporting MIME tell us that it's not real
> likely that most folks here will be sending spreadsheets out to the
> list readers and attaching GIFs anytime soon. No great loss, either.)

Substitute PGP or "cryptography" for MIME in the paragraph above and you 
will probably see why your attitude regarding the usefulness of MIME has so
many of us in disagreement.  I agree with Amanda's opinion that MIME is
less bleeding-edge than PGP, it has a well-defined standard and there are
actually a few good implementations of it out there.  

The fact that Microsoft has succumbed to the necessity of including MIME
support is probably a good indication of how far MIME has progressed (not
good support at the moment, but two years ago they were refusing to support
MIME and suggesting the net adopt MAPI...)  I still cannot go out and buy a
mail program with PGP built into it, but I can find several with MIME.
MIME will even make PGP and strong encryption more widespread because it
will make encryption/decryption and signing/verifying messages simple and
standard callouts from the mail program to an encryption engine.  Instead
of someone needing to search around for patches to Pine to integrate PGP [a
task which significantly raises the clue level needed to easily encrypt
mail] they will just add a line to thier mailcap file (or it will already
be bundled into thier mail/news/www agents.) 

If you are truly interested in making strong encryption easy and
transparent to the vast majority of the users of future communications
systems you should be leading the MIME charge, not holding everyone back...


jim