Re: [9fans] re: spam filtering fs

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

On Sun, Sep 07, 2003 at 07:22:04PM -0700, Geoff Collyer wrote:
>
> The only advantage of PGP is that it's what people use.  Phil
> Zimmermann spoke at Apple last year and said that at that time, if you
> measured how people encrypted their mail on the wire (when they did,
> which wasn't terribly often), it was virtually all using PGP's formats
> (they could be using PGP or gpg or something else).  Everything else
> combined was epsilon (negligible) and PGP was the rest.  His comment a
> year ago was that ``PGP *is* encrypted mail''.

If only we could get MUAs configured to handle encrypted mail by
default, users would get used to it without even noticing.  And only
S/MIME (or PEM) would be feasible, as a self-generated certificate can
then be included in the message.  Not a lot of security, but we're
dealing with lusers here.

Once everyone has built up a collection of certificates for their
correspondents, I believe that some peer pressure could trigger a
quest for third-party certification.  But the tools must be in place
first.

++L