Dave wrote:
Doesn't non-mime mean just us-ascii, ie just Roman alphabet, no accents? Wouldn't that be a bit limiting for non-English speaking email users?
I'm pretty sure that 8-bit transfer predates MIME. MIME is the most common way of specifying it now, but it's only a small part of it.
Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
It would also mean no rick text (fonts, colours, etc). That wouldn't bother me and I'm pretty sure MJR would love it, but its unrealistic to
I'd love stopping the idiots who specify things like white background with no specified text colour, so it goes wrong unless everyone has a default text colour similar to theirs.
If they aren't competent to design rich emails, they should stick to plain text ones rather than causing everyone pain. What's that saying about DTP? Something like "the good thing about DTP is that every man and his dog can design publications now; the bad thing about DTP is that most publications look like dogs designed them."
However, I did note that one-off rich content is a worthwhile use of MIME. I'm surprised that two of the apparent rebuttals use it as an example - rich emails and the PDF quotes - when I already said it was fine (although most people prefer a text quote to a PDF attachment, in my experience). Let me be clear:
- One-off rich mails are a fine use of MIME. - Most MIME use is not one-off rich mail. - MIME has turned out to be mostly evil.
All I'm asking for is responsible use of it, then we can change the balance back. Stuff like mass-mailing Word documents, letterhead graphics and video clips must stop, or per-byte mailserver charges will become reality sooner than we'd like.
ObOrigTopic: it seems like it would be far cheaper to switch on detection of repeat attachments and reject them at SMTP time with an appropriate "no bulk attachments" message. I like the idea of ocr'ing one-off attachments, for accessibility and searching, but that may be best done in the mail client.
Best wishes,