Stop it with putting your e-mail body in my MUA OT

Wed Jul 10 11:06:46 UTC 2002

I'm afraid you have brought up one of my pet peeves here.

On 03:57 PM 7/9/02, Bill Thompson wrote:

 >What you are seeing is PGP/MIME, a standards based protocol for

<snip blah blah blah>

Standards exist as a way for parties who *agree* to use certain data 
formats to use a previously defined standard format without having to 
redefine or renegotiate the format all the time.

Just because a standard exists for sending email with certain types of 
attachments, that doesn't mean that all users must agree to use clients 
that can (and will) process data in every new format, and thus everyone 
else needs to immediately adjust to each and every new standard that 
managed to make it thru the RFC process.  For instance, there's a 
"standard" for the text/html protocol too (and dozens of others), yet we 
clearly eschew that "standard" for messages sent to this mailing 
list.  What makes the PGP-MIME standard different, and so important, that 
the rest of us have to adapt to it, while eschewing other new standards?

	What's wrong with just using plain text and putting the
	damn PGP sig in the body?  That's a standard that all
	email clients can process, and it works for everyone.

Heck, it even worked for you when you sent the post I'm replying to here....

 >"John Palmer" <nanog at adns.net> wrote:
 >> This is even more annoying than HTML Mail.
 >>
 >That would be annoying if it were true.

What is most annoying is the apparent insistence that this particular 
standard is so critically important that everyone should rush out and 
upgrade their mail clients to new ones that can process these attachments 
(while 1001 other new types can just be ignored).  There are other ways to 
achieve the same goal (using plain text, no attachments needed), especially 
in a discussion list forum.  I find your position on PGP-MIME to be a 
violation of the spirit of RFC 1855 (which predates 2015):

     - If you include a signature keep it short.  Rule of thumb
       is no longer than 4 lines.  Remember that many people pay for
       connectivity by the minute, and the longer your message is,
       the more they pay.

     - "Reasonable" expectations for conduct via e-mail depend on your
       relationship to a person and the context of the communication.
       Norms learned in a particular e-mail environment may not apply in
       general to your e-mail communication with people across the
       Internet.  Be careful with slang or local acronyms.

     - Delivery receipts, non-delivery notices, and vacation programs
       are neither totally standardized nor totally reliable across the
       range of systems connected to Internet mail.  They are invasive
       when sent to mailing lists, and some people consider delivery
       receipts an invasion of privacy.  In short, do not use them.

(today's multitude of attachment formats are the invasive equivalent of 
yesteryear's
invasive and non-standard auto-responders, especially when sent to mailing 
lists)

     - Be careful with monospacing fonts and diagrams.  These will
       display differently on different systems, and with different
       mailers on the same system.

IMHO if you had to be careful about _font spacing_ to ensure your message 
was readable to everyone in the discussion forum, today you should be even 
*more* careful about attachments, ensuring that your message is sent in a 
format where it can be "properly displayed" on *all* recipient 
systems.  Attempting to force a new format on all members of a large and 
diverse mailing list when the new format is neither necessary nor widely 
supported (and reasonable alternatives exist) is just selfish, and rude.

jc