Re: ECN is on!

[Matthias Andree <ma@dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de>]

Richard Gooch <rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca> writes:

> Sure, Dave is being bloody-minded, but that's the only way we'll see
> people get off their fat, lazy asses and fix their broken systems.
> In fact, hopefully he's still in a dark mood, and he may take up the
> suggestion to bounce mails of the following type:
> - MIME encoded
> - HTML encoded
> - quoted printables (those stupid "=20" things are particuarly hard to
>   read).

MIME is no encoding, but a way to declare mail contents and encode
binary data. You need not use it on mail you send.

HTML is no encoding. (No doubt it's usually sent by people without A
Clue[tm] or being ruthless.)

quoted-printable is an encoding, and it's probably around for ten years
now. I can send base64 if you like that better, but then, even more
people will cry, while others don't even notice. 

Gnus 5.8 + Emacs, mutt, Netscape Communicator are three packages which
deal with MIME-"enhanced" mail.

Plus, people which use any characters beyond ASCII have no real choice
but to use MIME; if they have MTAs in between that don't talk
ESMTP/8BITMIME, then quoted-printable is what happens.

Use emil, metamail or such if you want to keep your mailer.

-- 
Matthias Andree