Re: Bug#3253: Pine over-encodes files (came from Bug#932)
On Thu, 13 Jun 1996, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > > Control R is the "correct" method for including plain text in an e-mail.
>
> That depends. Attachments are easier to handle for people with mime'd
> mailers.
I strongly disagree. Pine is a mime'd mailer. I use Pine. I hate getting
mail with attachments! Attachments are not easier to handle! Any other
mail I just press enter off the index list (or 'N'ext) and I can read the
posting. But with attachments you first have to ask to view the file, and,
most often, then must save the file before you can view it (outside the
mail agent) because many text files are improperly identified.
I must point out that there are several Debian maintainers who submit
their upload announcements as attachments. I find this so obnoxious that I
just delete such mail, out of hand.
>
> > Is it possible to configure smail, or some mail engine so that it returns
> > such kind of messages with an appropriate explanation how it should be done.
> > Or will this increase net usage enormously?
>
> It's a bad idea. It will _really_ annoy people.
>
> (The single most important problem with MIME is that people fight so much
> about it. MIME may be big, it may be complicated, but it's a standard,
> and it does make things better in the long run.)
>
Just because it is a standard, doesn't mean you should use it in a
universal fashion. The RS232 standard does not apply to parallel ports.
Neither should MIME encoding be used on plain text files, unless the file
is a like a diff file and must get through filters, character intact.
It is only that task that mime was designed to solve. It's indescriminate
use has caused more problems than it was supposed to solve.
DON'T MIME ENCODE PLAIN TEXT DATA! Specialy if your intent is to
communicate with a human at the other end. (Or a reasonable approximation
thereof ;-)
Later,
Dwarf
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aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (904) 877-0257
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Black Creek Critters e-mail: dwarf@polaris.net
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