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

Wed Jul 10 16:15:08 UTC 2002

"Leo Bicknell" <bicknell at ufp.org> illuminated our understanding with:
> In a message written on Wed, Jul 10, 2002 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.
Yup - I am not defending M$'s crapware here; any decent mail client
written in the last few years should at least show the text inline and
the sig as an attachment. What I am trying to say is it isn't a good
defense to say "oh, but its an RFC and my client can handle it, so yours
is broken". A documented abomination (and M$'s crapware handles that
abomination I came up with just fine) is still an abomination.
However, I try to avoid any sort of attachment or mime encoding for
mailing lists - simply because it can be badly broken by the list itself
(some lists strip attachments, leaving an uninteresting blank message
when you try to use pgp mime; some people read in digest mode which is
why attachments are stripped, and so forth).  pgp mime avoids taking up
message body space with the signature (which in most cases can be four
times the size of the message) so is a good thing - but that doesn't
mean that you should openly insult anyone whose software doesn't include
this feature. smtp works best with plaintext ascii-7; anything else is a
bonus, but shouldn't be mandatory.