Re: Content-Length harmful
On Sun, Nov 29, 1998 at 12:31:26AM -0500, Michael Stone wrote:
> > http://www.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/demo/content-length.html
> >
> > The latter is a classic.
>
> I think that the best comment was at the end: "You can't win." I prefer
> Content-Length for the simple reason that it's the easiest way to get
> unmunged mail in a near-mbox format. If anyone has a better solution,
> I'd love to hear it...
Actually, I really enjoyed reading through that page and was completely
convinced against Content-Length by those arguments. The big thing: if I
change my mailbox file with a text editor (yes, I do this sometimes), I have
to count bytes and change the header.
Maildir is a nice way to solve this.
Quoted-printable encoding is another possibility. The idea would be that
the MTA quotes the leading 'F' character into something else, and the MUA
decodes it. Hmm, I wonder if that would work. I don't remember if QP is
supposed to be decoded at the MTA layer.
Of course, you have to do lots of MIME munging to make anything decode QP
anyway... bummer.
Have fun,
Avery
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