Wed, 15 Jun 1994 15:09:17 +0200
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I think there is a misunderstanding. It now seems that you guys have been
talking about "genuine" MIME messages, with multimedia stuff and binary
exhibits (what "MIME" stands for, in other words). These messages are
clearly not usable unless you have a MIME mail program and some
multimedia applications, and there's nothing an intermediary server like
LISTSERV can do to help non-MIME users with these. I on the other hand
was talking about plain text messages that just happened to be MIME-ified
on the basis that there were non-ASCII characters that might get lost
otherwise, and with the result that only a select few can read the
message. I only see the former in RFC examples, whereas I run across the
latter every day :-) As long as the message cannot be made useful to
non-MIME readers, I agree there is no point in making it unusable to MIME
readers. It is a totally different story when you're talking about
regular text messages with national characters. We've been dealing with
these successfully (at least in Scandinavia) well before MIME existed. We
had a perfectly working network, and MIME looked like it would provide an
even better solution, but some people decided to force MIME down the
throats of our users ahead of its time, and the result was that from one
day to the other, users who'd been talking to each other just fine for
years started exchanging gibberish. Users generally expect network and
computer things to improve with time, and don't take too kindly to this
kind of accidents. The victims saw MIME as the thing that made it
impossible to send mail to their brother without transliterating the
national characters, or speaking English, when it worked fine before. Of
course we're pushing MIME harder than English-speaking people do, but
there are still a lot of users who can't handle it.
Eric
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