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Re: Bug#3253: Pine over-encodes files (came from Bug#932)



>>>>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.

I would argue that this is poor user interface design in Pine, not an
inherent feature of attachments.

>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 ;-)

It looks, from reading this, as if you've seriously confused MIME and
BASE64.  Please tell me this isn't true...

I can see why Pine might lead one to believe that MIME and BASE64 were
the same, given that it is so resistant to doing anything with MIME
without also BASE64ing everything in sight.

- Richard (who thinks Pine should MD5 and then BASE64 its message ids
           - they'd be shorter...)

-- 
http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/
GCS d- s+:- a-- C++ ULVS+++$ P+++ L++ E++ W(++,--) N(++,+) o? K w---
O? M- V? PS(+,+++) PE Y+ PGP+ t- 5++ X+@ R tv--- b++>++++ DI+ D+ G e++
h r% y++


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