The Grumpy Editor, graphical mail clients, and GPG

The Grumpy Editor, graphical mail clients, and GPG

the biggest reason for people needeing S/MIME support is that they need to interact with people who live in the corporate world where PGP support is only available in an expensive, hard to get licesnce (hard to get becouse the ownership of PGP has changed hands so much that it's hard ro figure out where to go to get a license and what license to get when you get there) GPG is free, but doesn't always have nice interactions with propriatary mail clients.

however all of these propriatary clients include S/MIME support, and while they would prefer you to buy certs from someone, they work just fine with certs produced by OpenSSL. as such it's frequently far easier for companies to deploy S/MIME then PGP/GPG and if you need to talk with them securely you need to adapt to their choice of software (you may not like this fact, but it's real. this is the same reason that OpenOffice is so important becouse it accepts the microsoft formats rather then just useing a batter format)