Jeff Licquia wrote:
Well, ignoring the fact that MIME appears to be infiltrating the Web as well...
I would differ with your analysis of MIME's lack of usefulness. It does provide a possible way to integrate PGP into the mail/Web landscape (from a crypto standpoint). Multimedia I'm not so sure about; I think the big draw to MIME will come when Person A drags and drops a spreadsheet into a MIME mailer and sends the message to Person B, who then clicks on an icon to pull up the spreadsheet. But I digress...
My issue has not been with MIME as a transport mechanism, but non-ASCII content, which clearly most folks can't read.
I'd say, however, that MIME isn't a done deal yet, though it's getting there. Until it's there, it's probably a bad idea. It's been my experience that many mailers are just MIME-compliant enough to cause their users lots of headaches.
Amen! This is the same point several people have made in follow-ups. The whole bit about transferring spreadsheets is nice--we've been able to do it on the Mac for many years, provided both sides have the right spreadsheet programs of course--but it's not of much use in communicating as we do on a mailing list. And "true MIME" is not what many so-called "MIMEs" apparently are.
(As I write this, I notice I'm using Eudora, which MIMEs all its stuff. Oh, well; I hope this message isn't too much trouble for y'all...)
It wasn't marked as Mime, and it gave me no trouble. Perhaps becuase looking at your headers reveals: X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Version 1.4.3 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I think the Content-Type field is the key. Is this the answer? Not completely. Part of the whole "complexity" issue I've been railing about (and echoed by such noted Neo-Luddites as Phil Zimmermann, John Markoff, and others) is that increasing numbers of messages need special processing, hang up my automatic downloading (as when my Eudora hangs in the middle of a long transfer, asking for instructions on how to handle an exception or special case, and Netcom hangs me up, forcing me to start over later and then babysit the transfer process so I can be there when Eudora hollers for help), and generally complicate our lives more than they help. Would Einstein have wasted his time trying to configure his mailer so he could see Amanda's GIF? (No offense meant, Amanda.)) ****AUTOMATIC TRANSFER OF CYPHERNOMICON COMPLETE**** Error 51: HARD DISK IS FULL Automatic Action 32A: Delete least-recently changed files. ****STARTING DELETIONS NOW***** Do you wish to continue? (y/n)