Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 07:24:00 -0800 (PST) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: ruth@muswell.demon.co.uk, sue@welearn.com.au Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Email [was: Squid will that be fried ?] Message-ID: <199803261524.HAA06831@pau-amma.whistle.com>
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>Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 12:48:57 GMT
>From: ruth moulton <ruth@muswell.demon.co.uk>
>People might be interested to know there are three basic standards
>...[much good information elided -- dhw]
>>Also make sure that it doesn't send
>>out HTML or any other attachments, whether it tells you it's sending them or
>>not.
>MIME - RFC2045-2049. This defines how to encode non us-ascii text and
>attachments so that they can be represented in ascii and hence
>sent by rfc822, and also how to devide the single 822 body into
>multiple parts using ascii separators.
>So, the point of all this verbage is that is perfectly OK to
>send attachments (What email.html says is don't send them
>unnecessarily), as long as they conform to the MIME standards.
I will take this opportunity to emphasize a point Ms Moulton made
below: sending MIME ("attachments") is, in general, only appropriate
& acceptable if the intended recipient(s) have the means for dealing
with the format(s) used...
>I'd rather encourage the use of MIME, ultimatly it enables a
>much more intelligent e-mail service, not discourage it, but it
>does need to be adhered to properly (unlike some of the stuff
>I've seen from MS). I suppose the real problem is that MIME and
>RFC822 are both extensible and what MS do nowdays is define thier
>own proprietry extenstions that are legal by MIME standards, but
>unusable to non MS software - I'll join you in trying to ban
>this stuff!!
...as a case in point.
I subscribe to some mailing lists (and I'm not referring to this one!)
where MIME is not welcome -- period. Its use after a warning is enough
to get one summarily unsubscribed (and the lists in question tend to be
"closed" -- the only folks who can send contributions to the list are
subscribers).
And I freely confess that the MUA (Mail User Agent -- vs. MTA) I use is
not MIME-aware. At this point in my life, I've only been using email
seriously since 1986, and I don't get so much MIME mail that it's worth
the hassle for me. The occasional piece I get, I either try to figure
out, respond with a request to the sender to use plain text, or delete
unread, depending on circumstances.
Cheers,
david
--
David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 401-0168
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