In message <20040518020041.GD3452@bcd.geek.com.au>, Daniel Carosone writes:
>

>On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 05:17:04PM -0700, Bill Studenmund wrote:
>> Once concern I have with smime (and this could be a misunderstanding) is=
>=20
>> that it is MIME, after all, and as such makes things 7-bit clean, no? I=
>=20
>> like the tar file container idea for the simple reason it's 8-bit clean.
>
>8-bit data gets base64 encoded, if that's what you mean, yes - or you
>do a detached signature and leave the original file alone.
>
Depends on what you're doing.  MIME does define a binary 
representation, though you can't generallyuse it for email.  Here's 
some text from RFC 2045:

   Mail transport for unencoded 8bit data is defined in RFC 1652.  As of
   the initial publication of this document, there are no standardized
   Internet mail transports for which it is legitimate to include
   unencoded binary data in mail bodies.  Thus there are no
   circumstances in which the "binary" Content-Transfer-Encoding is
   actually valid in Internet mail.  However, in the event that binary
   mail transport becomes a reality in Internet mail, or when MIME is
   used in conjunction with any other binary-capable mail transport
   mechanism, binary bodies must be labelled as such using this
   mechanism.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb