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



> >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.

I concur.  My mail agent (exmh) is also a MIME complient mailer.  
MIME-encoded mail is displayed, inplace, or piped to the appropriate 
program silently.  It will (properly) encode text files as text/plain, 
and offer me the choice of encoding methods, including unencoded.  I do 
not see properly labeled quoted-binary encoded parts as mangled, and 
even alternate fonts are handled transparantly (as I discovered when 
reading a list that had someone's name, in hebrew, in their .sig file).
> 
> >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.

MIME was designed to solve a number of problems.  One was the 
transmission of binary media.  Another was the transmission of text in 
different character sets.  And so forth.  MIME was designed from the 
start with the ability to transmit safely text files.  That is why 
text/plain and text/rfc822 are -required- MIME types.  That is why no 
encoding is a permitted option.  

Please note that if you send a file with a binary attachment in Pine, 
the entire mail message -is- MIME encapsulated, as multipart/mixed, the 
first part of which is MIME encapsulated as text/plain with no 
encoding, the second part of which has BASE64 encoding.  So my question 
is:  If Pine can generate the first part as text/plain with no 
encoding, why can't it the second?

I don't use Pine myself.  It has been suggested that ^R is a reasonable 
alternative to attaching a text file.  Does ^R automatically protect 
the included text from having leading or trailing blank lines deleted?  
This was recently important to me when I had to send a bug report to 
Ian Jackson that included a file with a trailing blank line.  I sent 
it, MIMEd, text/plain, unencoded.  If I used the analogous "insert text 
file" feature of my mailer, I would have had to place "cut here" lines 
before and after the file to make certain that the blank line (which 
might have been important in this case) was preserved.
> >
> >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 ;-)

As I said above, if I attach a binary file, I have absolutely no choice 
BUT to MIME encapsulate plain text data, since one part of my multipart 
message is plain text, sent as text/plain with no encoding.  There is 
nothing wrong with -properly- MIME encapsulating plain text data.  In 
some cases, it is vitally important for proper communication (imagine 
if I were using the character set iso-2022-jp, which is a  7-bit 
Japanese encoding designed for MIME.  The RFC (1468) that defines it 
states that Base64 or Quoted-Printable encoding would render it 
unreadable.  Without MIME encoding, many readers would not be able to 
properly identify it as non-ASCII.  I hope you don't claim that 
Japanese language documents are -not- plain text.)
> 
> 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.
> 

Strangely enough, the loudest complaints I hear about MIME come from 
either a) people without MIME-compliant mailers (who could be 
considered to have a semi-reasonable gripe), and b) Pine users or 
people dealing with Pine users.  

> - Richard (who thinks Pine should MD5 and then BASE64 its message ids
>            - they'd be shorter...)
> 
-- 
     Buddha Buck                      bmbuck@acsu.buffalo.edu
"She was infatuated with their male prostitutes, whose members were
like those of donkeys and whose seed came in floods like that of
stallions."  -- Ezekiel 23:20



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