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

Wed Jul 10 15:53:40 UTC 2002

In a message written on Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 04:31:40PM +0100, David Howe wrote:
> I think the point is people with non-compliant maillers delete mails
> with attachments and no body on sight... sometimes, in an automated
> rule. If you don't care that a percentage of your recipients don't ever

Ok, I tried to stay out of this one, but this comment made me feel
I have to jump in.  I'm all against attachments, file attachments.
Just because a message is MIME encoded, does not mean it is a file
though.

If people are throwing away MIME messages with a single "text/plain"
section then they are firmly in the wrong.  All of the "modern"
text and GUI mailers display this properly, inline, as a plain old
text message.

More to the point, if anyone bothered to look at a MIME/PGP message,
that's all it is.  Specifically, you'll see two parts:

] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
] Content-Disposition: inline
] Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

] Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
] Content-Disposition: inline

If your mailer isn't showing you the first one as a text/plain
message, even if it doesn't understand the second you need a new
mailer.

Equally, while I don't like the practice, if you haven't configured
your mailer to show you text/plain over text/html (assuming you
dislike html mail) in a multipart/alternative message then you're
also behind the times.  Don't complain about HTML mail when someone
is also sending you text, just because you're too backwards to
display it.

If we could convert the whole country, including Joe Idiot from
Leaded to Unleaded gas, I'm sure some "network savvy" people can
figure out how to make basic MIME work.  After all, if we can't
communicate in E-MAIL how will we ever make the networks go?

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org