On Feb 01, Mike Schiraldi [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: > > To me the ideal solution to the bandwidth issue would be a system that > > allowed you to send the whole key with the sig to certain people, and let > > people request it from key servers in other cases (mailing lists). > > I could attach just a signature and leave out the certs when sending to > certain mailing lists (using a hook to change smime_sign_command to toggle > OpenSSL's "--nocerts" switch). However, this only decreases the smime.p7s > size (after base64 decoding) from ~1700 bytes to ~650 bytes. I'm don't think > there's any way to get an S/MIME signature that's anywhere near as small as > a PGP signature. > > I know it's bad netiquette to waste other people's bandwidth, but i also > think unsecure email needs to be deprecated as soon as possible. > > Suggestions?
Well it would obviously be good if they could get the sig size down to something smaller, either through a more efficient algorithm or compressing it -- most people are in much better shape for CPU than they are for bandwidth, especially when you factor in per-minute costs for the latter. Also, they'd theoretically only need to decompress the sig if they actually wanted to verify it, and could otherwise ignore it. But I'm guessing it's too late to fix this in the specification itself, especially in things like the Outlook implementation. Maybe Mutt's implementation could support optionally compressing the signatures? It would only work among mailers that knew how to use it, but many people that know enough to care about this are going to be using a decent mailer. You could install gpg and use it when cooresponding with lists and people that can do better than just opportunistic encryption. Having Mutt support both should make switching between the two rather easy.
msg24091/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
