The Grumpy Editor, graphical mail clients, and GPG
Posted Jul 23, 2004 22:49 UTC (Fri) by
gargamel (guest, #10918)
Parent article:
The Grumpy Editor, graphical mail clients, and GPG
Thunderbird support S/MIME as this is what most corporate Public Key
Infrastructure (PKI) installations are based on. The last figures I saw
stated that the market share of (G)PGP is 60% while S/MIME has 40%, the
main difference being that private people and small companies normally
don't use S/MIME, while large enterprises prefer S/MIME.
The reason for large companies preferring S/MIME is that you don't have
to build a "web of trust". Instead CIOs (Chief Information Officers)
prefer to rely on Certification Authorities (CA) for authentication and
validity of certificates.
So when you receive a certificate in (G)PGP you have to trust *somebody*
that he/she is the person he/she claims to be. In S/MIME a CA (like
Verisign, eg) digitally signs the certificate of your communication
partner. The CA grants for the authenticity of certificates and the true
identity of your communication partner.
Another reason for large enterprises to trust Verisign and other CAs more
than people they already know, is that CIOs like to spend money on things
they could have free of charge... (like Operating Systems etc...) ;-)
Alex
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