Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap

> [...] ELM bombs [...]

Well, aside from the fact that I was being intentionally annoying (you
will note that I do not normally include my GIF signature in my messages),
I will say that the bugs in your mailer are not entirely my concern.
MIME is a standard for email on the Internet.  If your mailer chokes on it,
you can always get another mailer.  Pine is good, from what I've heard,
and handles MIME just fine.  It's just as free as ELM...


Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation

> 
> > [...] ELM bombs [...]
> 
> Well, aside from the fact that I was being intentionally annoying (you
> will note that I do not normally include my GIF signature in my messages),
> I will say that the bugs in your mailer are not entirely my concern.
> MIME is a standard for email on the Internet.  If your mailer chokes on it,
> you can always get another mailer.  Pine is good, from what I've heard,
> and handles MIME just fine.  It's just as free as ELM...

And further, a properly configured and installed elm doesn't have problems
either, on a real operating system like Linux!

> 
> Amanda Walker
> InterCon Systems Corporation
> 


-- 
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

I promised myself I wouldn't send any more mail to the list about this, but
I'm veering back into a more general discussion of software standards. And
yes, this is getting my goat.

Amanda Walker writes:
> I will say that the bugs in your mailer are not entirely my concern.

I readily agree that the parts where ELM traps me in a sequence of RETURN
prompts are entirely my problem (or more properly, the ELM author{'s, s'}
problem).  I didn't blame anyone for them.

> MIME is a standard for email on the Internet.  If your mailer chokes on it,
> you can always get another mailer.  

Maybe I should quote myself here. I wrote:
$ Speaking of which, can anyone explain why my usually-MIME-compliant mail
$ reader (ELM 2.4 PL22) pukes on the fancy parts of all these draft
$ announcements ?

Emphasis on "usually-MIME-compliant". Most of the MIME mail I've ever received
has been processed correctly. But certain objects like this .gif you sent
are another story. I've never been a subscriber to alt.binaries.pictures.*
and I only know we have a .gif viewer around here because they digitized
pictures of everyone in the dept. Now you're expecting me to hunt around for
viewers for .gifs and TIFFS and JPEGs and God knows what else you might want
to send me ?  It's a nontrivial AI task to expect my poor mailer to track
down this arbitrarily large set of utilities, and a distinctly aggravating
human task to attempt the same.

ELM appears to be telling me, "this doesn't fit any of the 937 cases with
which I'm familiar, so I don't know what to do", which seems pretty
reasonable to me.

.GIF is not part of the standard for the format of Internet email, is it ?

> Pine is good, from what I've heard,
> and handles MIME just fine.  It's just as free as ELM...

I only switched to ELM a few months ago. I guess I'm actually getting pretty
comfortable with using it, which means it's time to ditch it.

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From:  "L. McCarthy" <lmccarth@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
Message-Id:  <199411192109.QAA04661@ducie.cs.umass.edu>
To:  cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Reply-To:  cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
In-Reply-To:  <199411192018.PAA28766@intercon.com> from "Amanda Walker" at Nov 19, 94 03:18:19 pm
X-Mailer:  ELM [version 2.4 PL22]
Mime-Version:  1.0
Content-Type:  text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding:  7bit
Content-Length:  2227      

By the above headers, your ELM mailer is advertising itself as being MIME compliant.

Sender:  owner-cypherpunks@toad.com
Precedence:  bulk
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>
>> MIME is a standard for email on the Internet.  If your mailer chokes on it,
>> you can always get another mailer.  
>
>Maybe I should quote myself here. I wrote:
>$ Speaking of which, can anyone explain why my usually-MIME-compliant mail
>$ reader (ELM 2.4 PL22) pukes on the fancy parts of all these draft
>$ announcements ?
>
>Emphasis on "usually-MIME-compliant". Most of the MIME mail I've ever received
>has been processed correctly. But certain objects like this .gif you sent
>are another story. I've never been a subscriber to alt.binaries.pictures.*
>and I only know we have a .gif viewer around here because they digitized
>pictures of everyone in the dept. Now you're expecting me to hunt around for
>viewers for .gifs and TIFFS and JPEGs and God knows what else you might want
>to send me ?  It's a nontrivial AI task to expect my poor mailer to track
>down this arbitrarily large set of utilities, and a distinctly aggravating
>human task to attempt the same.

Being MIME compliant is very easy.  If you find any part of mail you
don't understand, whether it is a picture, sound, or whatever, you
are just supposed to give the user the opportunity to write it to
a file with the uu-like-encoding that MIME may have done undone.

>ELM appears to be telling me, "this doesn't fit any of the 937 cases with
>which I'm familiar, so I don't know what to do", which seems pretty
>reasonable to me.
>
>.GIF is not part of the standard for the format of Internet email, is it ?

The most current version (draft-ietf-822ext-mime-imb-00.txt) has image
audio and video body parts defined including jpeg and gif under image
but, as I say, you don't have to really understand these formats to be
MIME compliant.  I think all this stuff is also in the current MIME
RFC also.

>> Pine is good, from what I've heard,
>> and handles MIME just fine.  It's just as free as ELM...
>
>I only switched to ELM a few months ago. I guess I'm actually getting pretty
>comfortable with using it, which means it's time to ditch it.

Donald