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Worldtalk's WorldSecure operates as a plug-in to both Microsoft Exchange/ Outlook97 and QUALCOMM's Eudora Pro: both of which are supported by a standalone certificate manager application. Although it was seemingly advantageous to add S/MIME support into existing mail clients, we found the WorldSecure client somewhat nonintuitive to use. Also, we were surprised to find that both plug-ins were not equal. Interoperability varied with the host program's mail transport, giving an edge to Eudora's non-MAPI transport. While the Eudora plug-in decoded both clear and opaque-signed messages with ease, the Outlook 97 plug-in we tested supported only opaque signed messages (because of the fact that it must transmit messages via MAPI). The Outlook 97 plugin worked well when it found opaque signed messages (from Outlook Express and Baltimore's MailSecure), but was completely incompatible with clearsigned messages.
The Worldtalk's Eudora Pro plug-in proved excellent at message handling, but we found it very cumbersome when compared to the Outlook plug-in. All incoming S/MIME messages show up as attachments in an otherwise empty message in the Eudora window. Double-clicking on the attachment launches the WorldSecure Client, which verifies the signature, decrypts the message and spits it back into Eudora's message window. Unfortunately,...