Re: MIME mail

On Fri, 6 Feb 1998, Tim Jones wrote:

> MIME is a de-facto standard for email communications
> so much so that you may not even realise your email program is doing
it which I 
> think is probably happening in this case. If you're stuck with an
email 
> program, through no fault of your own, and it doesn't do MIME then I
think you 
> have to live with it under the axiom "good of the many outweigh the
good of the 
> few"

Nota bene, the only time that a MIME email-aware mailer /should/ have
MIME-converted data (as opposed to just straight, readable text) is if
and
only if the data /is/ an attachment (and, as above, is evil and
wasteful).
Such things like HTML-encoded emails and the like are also, as above,
definitively evil.  Thus I think we can say definitively in the case
above
that its the sender's misconfiguration (if reply text is sent
MIME-encoded) or the sender's willful evil (if they replied in HTML or
put
on an attachment) that's the problem, not Mike.

I do note to Mike that both Pine and Elm are MIME-capable these days and
can, if one bothers (I seldom do), decode the MIMEification.  Its best,
however, if we never see it at all.

ObGZG: Whatever happened to the FMA Thrust project?

-- 
[  Alexander Williams {thantos@alf.dec.com/zander@photobooks.com}  ]
[ Alexandrvs Vrai,  Prefect 8,000,000th Experimental Strike Legion ]
[	     BELLATORES INQVIETI --- Restless Warriors		   ]
====================================================================
"Here at Ortillery Command we have at our disposal hundred megawatt
    laser beams, mach 20 titanium rods and guided thermonuclear
 bombs. Some people say we think that we're God. We're not God. We
   just borrowed his 'SMITE' button for our fire control system."