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 #---