On Tue, 14 Jun 1994 08:49:46 -0500 David E Boyes <[log in to unmask]> said: >I'm afraid I disagree. The only crucial part of a MIME message that is >not part of the body of the message is the MIME-Version: header, which >is pretty innocuous compared to what the body of the message looks like. That is not correct. There are two other vital tags, "Content-Type:" and "Content-Transfer-Encoding:". These tags often contain long ID and boundaries and other cryptic things that are frightening to computer-shy people. >Passing the MIME-Version header through the SHORT header filter is >low-impact to users But doesn't achieve anything unless the other two tags are passed as well. >PROFS and All-in-1 won't know what to do with it and will simply ignore >it, but many of the PC packages now understand MIME even if the users >don't know it. So make FULL headers the default. FULL headers aren't an inconvenience to people with a sophisticated user interface. By definition, SHORT headers are for PROFS, ALL-IN-1 and other users without RFC822 interfaces. These users don't want to see tags they don't need and don't understand. LISTSERV strives to reduce the header size to a minimum, and "MIME-Version: 1.0", "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII" aren't useful or necessary to them. If your subscribers all have sophisticated programs, then SHORT is simply not the appropriate default option. >Like it or not, MIME is here, and is seeing increasing use. PMDF >produces MIME messages by default, And that's a serious mistake (I mean to the extent that it will base64 encode any message with one or more 8-bit characters). There is still a majority of users that cannot read such messages. Witness the amount of people who complain about this feature on the PMDF list! Contrary to popular belief on your side of the big pond, quoted-printable is not any better. When the escaped characters are your everyday vowels, rather than an occasional weird letter in a foreign address, and you have as many as 12 possible codes in both upper and lower case form, quoted-printable is just as convenient to read for the average user as base64. We only have 3 8-bit vowels in Sweden, and I still won't read a QP-encoded message in Swedish unless I have a *good* reason to. Even truncated just-send-8 with random letters substituted for the national characters is easier to read than QP. Eric