The consensus of the active posters in this latest thread (Perry, Amanda, Lucky, Jim, others) is that I am a hopeless fuddy-duddy, unwilling to begin posting in the latest modality.
Actually, that's not my feeling at all. I haven't (at least intentionally) been making or intending to make the kinds of "get with the program" remarks that Lucky, Perry, and some other have been. I've just been trying to explain why I think that MIME isn't necessarily bunk. There is a middle ground between "the one true way" and "utter crap," after all, and I found your assertions that MIME was useless to be just as annoying as assertions that it's a panacea. I'm not telling you (or anyone else) to use MIME. Even I don't use the fancy features MIME for most of my off-site email, especially mailing lists, for exactly the reasons you describe. I'm just tired of people deciding the because they're not able to take advatange of something, that it is therefore useless. That's all I've been intending to complain about, and I'm sorry if I've come across more strongly. I certainly don't want to chase you off the list. You're one of the people I take pains to read, even on high-volume email days...
Bluntly, I'm fucking sick and tired of these cheap shots and personal innuendos. Maybe it's the "young guns" syndrome, with a codger like me whose first Net account was in 1972 being a ripe target for the newest pistoleros with their .486-caliber Linux boxes in their holsters.
Well, I came onto the net after the NCP/TCP flag day, so you've got some seniority on me, but I'm hardly a young gun, and I hate Intel processors and UNIX :). I started in the spring of 1982 on a VAX 11/780 with real live DEC VT100s, and an ADDS Viewpoint on a 1200 baud modem (at the time, this was really fast) in my dorm room. I was just awful to come back from a week's vacation and spend a whole hour catching up with Usenet--and that was before you could unsubscribe to individual groups :). To a large degree, it's this dozen years of experience with the net that makes me optimistic about things like encryption, MIME, and so on. Every time the baseline moves up, people complain. It happened moving from NCP to TCP/IP. It happened when moving from A News to B News (my site was actually an A News holdout for a long time). It happened when net.* got broken up into a set of hierarchies (alt.* is a remarkably long-lived fragment of that changeover), and it's happening now with things like PGP & MIME. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Part of the cypherpunks mission, as I understand it, is to help to keep moving that baseline, concentrating on one particular direction (privacy). I'll stop posting on side issues if it will help keep the focus on privacy, and help keep folks like you from giving up in frustration. After all, cypherpunks is far from the only soapbox I subscribe to :). Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation