The problem caused by deployment of these competing standards is that there is no guarantee that a signed message will be verifiable by the recipient. The other problem is that signatures or sometimes the original email message itself, appear as indecipherable attachments when email clients having some other MIME-based standard, receive them.
This standardization problem has now been solved by the wide-scale deployment of mail clients implementing the S/MIME standard. Support for S/MIME is built-in to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla and Netscape. Moreover, the keys by several popular certification authorities (CAs) are distributed both with these programs and with many popular operating systems. Thus, there is a high likelihood that digitally signed mail, once sent, can be readily verified.
Geetanjali Kulkarni is a Marketing Executive at E-Lock Technologies. E-Lock is a leading provider of Digital Signature and Cryptographic solutions
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