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