From: "L. McCarthy" <lmccarth@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 94 13:08:51 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Subject: Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
In-Reply-To: <199411192018.PAA28766@intercon.com>
Message-ID: <199411192109.QAA04661@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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I promised myself I wouldn't send any more mail to the list about this, but
I'm veering back into a more general discussion of software standards. And
yes, this is getting my goat.

Amanda Walker writes:
> I will say that the bugs in your mailer are not entirely my concern.

I readily agree that the parts where ELM traps me in a sequence of RETURN
prompts are entirely my problem (or more properly, the ELM author{'s, s'}
problem).  I didn't blame anyone for them.

> MIME is a standard for email on the Internet.  If your mailer chokes on it,
> you can always get another mailer.  

Maybe I should quote myself here. I wrote:
$ Speaking of which, can anyone explain why my usually-MIME-compliant mail
$ reader (ELM 2.4 PL22) pukes on the fancy parts of all these draft
$ announcements ?

Emphasis on "usually-MIME-compliant". Most of the MIME mail I've ever received
has been processed correctly. But certain objects like this .gif you sent
are another story. I've never been a subscriber to alt.binaries.pictures.*
and I only know we have a .gif viewer around here because they digitized
pictures of everyone in the dept. Now you're expecting me to hunt around for
viewers for .gifs and TIFFS and JPEGs and God knows what else you might want
to send me ?  It's a nontrivial AI task to expect my poor mailer to track
down this arbitrarily large set of utilities, and a distinctly aggravating
human task to attempt the same.

ELM appears to be telling me, "this doesn't fit any of the 937 cases with
which I'm familiar, so I don't know what to do", which seems pretty
reasonable to me.

.GIF is not part of the standard for the format of Internet email, is it ?

> Pine is good, from what I've heard,
> and handles MIME just fine.  It's just as free as ELM...

I only switched to ELM a few months ago. I guess I'm actually getting pretty
comfortable with using it, which means it's time to ditch it.

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