<div>On 1/30/06, Gordon Messmer <<a href="mailto:yinyang@eburg.com">yinyang@eburg.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Arthur Pemberton wrote: > > Could someone briefly fill me in on the if, why and how of email > signing (I do not mean signatures). I am sure I can google the how, > but I would like opions and experiences. OK, I presume that you mean cryptographic signing. Message signing can be done with either SMIME or PGP. Both accomplish the same thing, and operate in virtually the same way. Why sign? It's all about trust. If you reliably sign your messages, the people with whom you exchange messages can configure their mail client to trust the fingerprint of your certificate (or, they may trust someone who signed your certificate). They can trust that a message with your name on it, which has a valid signature, was written by you and has not been tampered with. They should also learn not to trust messages that have your name on it, but no signature. Which method you choose probably will be influenced most by who, exactly, you want to be able to verify your signatures. SMIME uses, in large part, the same infrastructure that is already in virtually every mail client to support SSL connections. That's one of the reasons that SMIME is supported by nearly every major mail client available, out of the box. PGP does pretty much exactly the same thing, but requires an entirely separate infrastructure. I'm not aware of any major client that supports PGP by default; they require plugins, mostly. That gives SMIME a significant advantage if you want to sign messages, and have that information be useful to a wide audience.</blockquote><div> What is the difference between "S/MIME" and "S/MIME opaque" ? </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">-- fedora-list mailing list <a href="mailto:fedora-list@redhat.com">fedora-list@redhat.com </a> To unsubscribe: <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list</a> </blockquote></div> -- As a boy I jumped through Windows, as a man I play with Penguins.