Re: S/MIME publishing mailing list

Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> 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.

As said I don't want to wait another 20 years before encrypting e-mails with a
new shiny HTTP-based infrastructure.

> There are corner cases everywhere and a large number of servers have idiot
> ideas about mangling messages.

I'm pretty sure that it would take many years before all implementation issues
in corner cases are sorted out when switching to HTTP.

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

???

All the S/MIME enabled MUAs take the S/MIME cert from a signed e-mail
including the S/MIME capabilities. And yes, I know how to distribute certs via
HTTP and that could be a second option.

Ciao, Michael.

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