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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Stop it with putting your e-mail body in my MUA OT
I'm afraid you have brought up one of my pet peeves here. On 03:57 PM 7/9/02, Bill Thompson wrote: >What you are seeing is PGP/MIME, a standards based protocol for <snip blah blah blah> Standards exist as a way for parties who *agree* to use certain data formats to use a previously defined standard format without having to redefine or renegotiate the format all the time. Just because a standard exists for sending email with certain types of attachments, that doesn't mean that all users must agree to use clients that can (and will) process data in every new format, and thus everyone else needs to immediately adjust to each and every new standard that managed to make it thru the RFC process. For instance, there's a "standard" for the text/html protocol too (and dozens of others), yet we clearly eschew that "standard" for messages sent to this mailing list. What makes the PGP-MIME standard different, and so important, that the rest of us have to adapt to it, while eschewing other new standards? What's wrong with just using plain text and putting the damn PGP sig in the body? That's a standard that all email clients can process, and it works for everyone. Heck, it even worked for you when you sent the post I'm replying to here.... >"John Palmer" <[email protected]> wrote: >> This is even more annoying than HTML Mail. >> >That would be annoying if it were true. What is most annoying is the apparent insistence that this particular standard is so critically important that everyone should rush out and upgrade their mail clients to new ones that can process these attachments (while 1001 other new types can just be ignored). There are other ways to achieve the same goal (using plain text, no attachments needed), especially in a discussion list forum. I find your position on PGP-MIME to be a violation of the spirit of RFC 1855 (which predates 2015): - If you include a signature keep it short. Rule of thumb is no longer than 4 lines. Remember that many people pay for connectivity by the minute, and the longer your message is, the more they pay. - "Reasonable" expectations for conduct via e-mail depend on your relationship to a person and the context of the communication. Norms learned in a particular e-mail environment may not apply in general to your e-mail communication with people across the Internet. Be careful with slang or local acronyms. - Delivery receipts, non-delivery notices, and vacation programs are neither totally standardized nor totally reliable across the range of systems connected to Internet mail. They are invasive when sent to mailing lists, and some people consider delivery receipts an invasion of privacy. In short, do not use them. (today's multitude of attachment formats are the invasive equivalent of yesteryear's invasive and non-standard auto-responders, especially when sent to mailing lists) - Be careful with monospacing fonts and diagrams. These will display differently on different systems, and with different mailers on the same system. IMHO if you had to be careful about _font spacing_ to ensure your message was readable to everyone in the discussion forum, today you should be even *more* careful about attachments, ensuring that your message is sent in a format where it can be "properly displayed" on *all* recipient systems. Attempting to force a new format on all members of a large and diverse mailing list when the new format is neither necessary nor widely supported (and reasonable alternatives exist) is just selfish, and rude. jc
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