Date: Mon, 09 May 2005 11:15:12 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] MIME mail [was: Re: [WSFA] Re: Life, Such As It Is]
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

At 08:25 AM 5/9/05 -0400, Michael Walsh wrote:
>> kfl at KeithLynch.net 5/8/2005 11:33:05 PM >>>

>>Actually, any program which doesn't *default* to off, and *warn* you
>>when you try to turn it on ("are you SURE you really want to do
>this?")
>>was written by idiots, and should be replaced.
>
>Must be a lot of that going around since there's a page devoted to "how
>to turn it off in various mail programs."

I'm with Keith on that one...and you are right, there're a lot of idiots
writing mail programs.  Actually, the coders probably aren't the
idiots...it's the marketing morons who insist on that "feature", since they
like to spend their work time picking out pretty fonts and trying out
different colors rather than just sending the information in readable
format, so they figure everyone else is equally stupid and will want the
same capabilities.

There are times and places where MIME encoding is needed, but mailing lists
and usenet newsgroups in English aren't included in that set of times and
places.  When sending to someone you know for a fact can handle that stuff,
it does no harm other than wasting bandwidth.  When you need to send
something that includes pictures, sounds, or non-English character sets, it
will let you do that, and anyone who wants to receive such things is
probably set up to deal with it.

Having your mail program come out of the box sending HTML and MIME-encoded
messages, with no warnings about this and with no obvious and simple way to
disable it and just send plain ASCII mail (having to hunt through deep
menus or search the web for instructions on turning the stuff off is not
"obvious and simple"...) is just a Bad Idea (tm), and probably the result
of at least one idiot at work somewhere.

-- Mike B.
--
Murphy was an optimist.