Re: [VM] s/mime support?

[Arik Mitschang]

Definitely agree, and I think it's totally reasonable to implement
with external tools with the caveat that a platform without these
tools is implicitly not supported. And since, at least for incoming
messages, the s/mime content is an attachment when the case is not
supported VM would be happy leaving things alone. All we would need
really is to have a variable with the proper command line to generate
a pkcs7 data structure, and conversely something to decompose
one. openssl likely covers the vast majority of systems.

I think the biggest challenge would be the management of certificates
and private keys. Needs some structure, but probably should leave a
lot of choices to the user, i.e. don't go requiring extra private keys
and/or copying existing ones to numerous locations, etc.

Support would obviously be more of a long term goal, since there's a
bit of thought that should go into this, but since a bunch of other
clients already have (at least rudimentary) support, seems like it
would help keep VM competitive.

~Arik


Tim Cross writes:
 > 
 > I think s/mime support is probably a good idea in principal. However, I 
 > suspect
 > the difficulty may be in getting consistency across all the platforms VM runs
 > on, especially if this support will rely on external tools. It is probably
 > legitimate to explicitly support only some platforms, provided the feature
 > doesn't cause problems on platforms where it is not supported. 
 > 
 > Tim
 > 
 > Arik Mitschang writes:
 >  > Hi All,
 >  > 
 >  > Just wondering if folks have any thoughts on working toward support of
 >  > s/mime in VM? I mean something like using the mime capabilities to
 >  > recognize "pkcs7-mime" content-types and then running a tool like
 >  > openssl on the components of such a message. Or when composing a
 >  > message we could have support for s/mime by parsing the recipients and
 >  > locating appropriate certificates in a directory with symlinks and
 >  > signing capability of course.
 >  > 
 >  > If we rely in a big part on external tools (like openssl) it might be
 >  > a pretty easy thing to work in, plus speed is really a non-issue here.
 >  > 
 >  > Thanks,
 >  > ~Arik
 >  > 
 > 
 > -- 
 > Tim Cross
 > address@hidden
 > 
 > There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
 > understand and those who do not understand what they manage.
 > -- 
 > Tim Cross
 > address@hidden
 > 
 > There are two types of people in IT - those who do not manage what they 
 > understand and those who do not understand what they manage.

-- 
Arik W. Mitschang