A Plea for sanity when posting to this list.

James Wilkinson ubuntu at westexe.demon.co.uk
Mon May 16 12:20:28 UTC 2005


David Marsh wrote:
> It's because any form of attachment creates all kind of cruft (fore and
> aft) which a MIME-aware mailer would hide from the reader, but which a 
> newsreader can't be expected to be aware of, making the message hard to
> read. I read all large lists via gmane as it would simply be too much
> information for me to deal with as 'mail', otherwise.
<snip>
> -- 
> David Marsh,          <http://www.viewport.co.uk/>  /  [en, fr, (de)]  
> Edinburgh, Scotland.  <email valid at time-of-msg> but list reply preferred
> » Don't seem lazy & stupid: Please trim & interleave quotes in replies «

I'd just like to point out that without MIME, that signature wouldn't
come across properly. The » is an ISO 8859-1 character (the Western
European standard encoding), and you need MIME to use that. Without
MIME, all you can reliably use is plain ASCII. So no German ßs, no
French accents, no Greek letters, no Russian, no Japanese, no
Chinese,...

I agree that MIME has facilitated a lot of unwanted extra attachments.
I'm sending this with mutt, which has been trained to seriously score
down HTML-only e-mails.

But MIME is a necessity for so much of the world's population that
honestly, any general-purpose mail or news program that doesn't
understand it is broken.

(You seem to be using slrn. I thought that understood MIME. It certainly
generates correct MIME...)

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | "The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and,
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo."
                      |     -- Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters




More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list