S/MIME or PGP/MIME?

Martin Christensen factotum@gvdnet.dk
Fri Dec 7 01:35:01 2001


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>>>>> "Simon" =3D=3D Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>> I'm not sure if this is one of those questions that only have
>> religious answers, but which of S/MIME and PGP/MIME should be used?
Simon> Both are widely used.  Use whatever you like most, or whichever
Simon> is used by the people you communicate with.

Hmm... I'm mostly concerned about what's readable elsewhere.

I've discovered what's probably slightly buggy behaviour in Oort Gnus:
the plain-text part of a PGP/MIME or S/MIME message doesn't have a
'Content-Type: text/plain', as should probably be expected. I've had a
look at the source, but haven't been able to properly find the root of
this behaviour yet. This might be the explanation for why I've
received some complaints that my messages show up as attachments.

>> It seems that OpenPGP capable mail clients should implement
>> PGP/MIME, but I haven't found anything on S/MIME in the same
>> context.
Simon> I don't understand, S/MIME is a spec similar to PGP/MIME.  If
Simon> you are looking for a implementation of S/MIME, there are
Simon> several, of which Mozilla NSS and OpenSSL are free resp open
Simon> source.

Obviously, but it's difficult to find any sobre information about why
two specs exist and what the difference is.

Martin

=2D-=20
Homepage:       http://www.cs.auc.dk/~factotum/
GPG public key: http://www.cs.auc.dk/~factotum/gpgkey.txt

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