From: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd (Beast)" <dee-punk@qsland.lkg.dec.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 94 12:15:02 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Subject: Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
In-Reply-To: <199411192109.QAA04661@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <9411231951.AA03442@qsland>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



From:  "L. McCarthy" <lmccarth@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
Message-Id:  <199411192109.QAA04661@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
To:  cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Reply-To:  cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
In-Reply-To:  <199411192018.PAA28766@intercon.com> from "Amanda Walker" at Nov 19, 94 03:18:19 pm
X-Mailer:  ELM [version 2.4 PL22]
Mime-Version:  1.0
Content-Type:  text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding:  7bit
Content-Length:  2227      

By the above headers, your ELM mailer is advertising itself as being MIME compliant.

Sender:  owner-cypherpunks@toad.com
Precedence:  bulk
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>
>> 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.

Being MIME compliant is very easy.  If you find any part of mail you
don't understand, whether it is a picture, sound, or whatever, you
are just supposed to give the user the opportunity to write it to
a file with the uu-like-encoding that MIME may have done undone.

>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 ?

The most current version (draft-ietf-822ext-mime-imb-00.txt) has image
audio and video body parts defined including jpeg and gif under image
but, as I say, you don't have to really understand these formats to be
MIME compliant.  I think all this stuff is also in the current MIME
RFC also.

>> 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.

Donald