From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 95 02:30:11 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: MIME attachments and ranting.
Message-ID: <199509190929.CAA23989@ix.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




>> >Attachment Converted: D:\DOWNLOAD\MIME\RePGPfor.8
>> I, for one, don't need Mystery MIME Attachments cluttering up my drive. If
>> it's worth saying, then *say* it.
>I really don't know why any mailers call a monopart MIME message an
>"attachment".

Mail readers come in three basic flavors of unMIMEificationness:
1) Ignorance+bliss - the mailer doesn't know or care about MIME headers,
   and you can ignore them when you read them, and may be able to configure
   the reader not to bother you with most of them (e.g. BSD Mail.)
3) Intelligence - the mailer does something genuinely useful to help you
   read the attachment, like letting you pop up some appropriate reading tool.
2) Naive friendliness - the Sirius Cybernetics approach.  "Your mail file has
   been tastefully shredded into little pieces and sprinkled around your
disk drive.
   Thank you for making a humble mail system so _very_ happy."  Free Eudora
versions
   offer you several choices of tastefulness and shredditude, partly
intended to 
   provide artistic functionality and partly to encourage you to buy the
commercial
   version which gives you a more flexible user interface for extensions
like MIME.
   So buy it, or cope with it, or tell Eudora to use your RAMdisk for its
attachments
   where they'll soon go away and not bother you.

There's also another approach, typified by a vendor whose name will be omitted
but they'd know who they were if they had a <perjorative deleted> clue....

0) Downright hostile - Not only does it _pretend_ to be Intelligent, while
   only really doing the right thing with its own proprietary data formats*,
   though generally doing something reasonable with uuencoded documents with
   names that it understands, but it chokes and dies on messages that have
   even moderately large amounts of simple, basic, non-attachmentized _text_,
   and if you _do_ try to package text up to send to some poor sucker who's
   stuck with one of these <perjorative deleted> systems, it hands it to a 
   brain-damaged user-friendly mouse-editor that _also_ chokes on more than
   64KB of text....

[* where "the right thing" allows it to mindlessly run arbitrary code handed
to it as macros in the proprietary data formats that the company encourages its
users to use instead of real text....]

   
#---
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
#---