Re: S/MIME publishing mailing list

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Michael Ströder <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> > At the moment all messages go over HTTP. I see no advantage to using SMTP
> > for the purpose of managing certs and private keys. I am not aware of any
> > modern Internet device that is not capable of doing HTTP. Why make things
> > hard?
>
> Call me old-fashioned. But still 100% of my sent and received e-mail
> messages
> are transported over SMTP (on some connections even using STARTTLS).
> Trading
> HTTP over SMTP does not gain anything.
>

It gains a great deal of speed and removes many sources of instability and
unreliability. Rather than being limited to a single request/response it is
easy to make additional requests if warranted.

The SMTP email infrastructure is horrible to work with. There are corner
cases everywhere and a large number of servers have idiot ideas about
mangling messages.


While there may be whatever genious solution available in the future I'm
> aiming to use S/MIME via SMTP with all its current drawbacks, because
> that's
> what's widely implemented *now*.
>

The objective is to distribute certs though, that is a problem HTTP is
already designed to support and SMTP is not.

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