From: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 1996 13:03:19 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: "Microsoft.com" added to my KILL file
Message-ID: <v02120d16ad1667f19160@[192.0.2.1]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 12:32 1/7/96, Timothy C. May wrote:

>This is a battle I've been fighting for roughly the past year. When I get a
>blank message from someone saying only "attachment converted," I add that
>username to my kill file. My feeling is that a mailing list with 1000+
>subscribers, or even one with far fewer, is a terrible place to send
>non-ASCII messages. Readers will be using VT-100s on campus networks, old
>Amiga 1000s, EMACs, Suns, Macs, IBM PCs, Windows, and all sorts of
>configurations to read mail, and there is almost no chance that all or even
>most of these will be brought up to the latest MIME standards. Plain ASCII,
>such as 98% of this list has been for the past several years, is the lingua
>franca, the lowest common denominator (see, some number theory relevance
>for you purists!) of the Net. There has been little compelling need for
>embedded spreadsheets and embedded graphics. And as for attachments, such
>as attaching programs for running on a machine, mailing list messages are a
>very poor way to distribute such programs, for many reasons.

I agree 100% with this paragraph. [Some old story, if you don't know it,
don't worry :-]


-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com>
   PGP encrypted mail preferred.