On Mon, 31 Jan 2000 11:32:59 -0500 (EST), David Alex Lamb
<dalamb@cs.queensu.ca> wrote:
> Someone recently advised against sending MIME to the news.answers
> addresses. Let me add an exclamation point to that -- after many
> frustrating experiences of shipping files around to various places
Let me elaborate a little bit on what I wrote.
The reason I stated you "probably" can use MIME, as long as you don't
send silly attachments, is that correctly formatted text/plain in the
ASCII character set should look exactly the same with MIME as without
MIME. In other words, MIME is not the problem really, it's the way
some clients force QP encoding on stuff which would otherwise be just
fine. So what you really want to avoid is (1) gratuitous attachments
and (2) encodings such as quoted-printable.
A lot of clients will automatically QP-encode anything which contains
(1) accented or graphical characters (i.e. non-ASCII; anything with
the 8th bit set) or (2) overlong lines, but only if you send using
MIME, whereas they will just send them "as usual" if you turn MIME
off. Turning off MIME is a cheap "fix" but arguably the less correct
way to deal with the problem.
On the other hand, if your posting doesn't contain anything else to
trigger the MIME wrapping, your message will generally be left alone.
In countries where you need to use MIME in daily communications,
because you need to use some other character set than US-ASCII in a
transparent and portable way, turning off MIME altogether is not
really a viable solution.
I'll try to suppress the inevitable corollary regarding ignorant
imperialistic Americans. Oops. Sorry. No offense. :-)
The long Newsgroups: line which many FAQ postings carry is a problem
here, because it will trigger MIME encoding in some clients. IMHO the
best way to cope is to use a client which allows you more control, but
feel free to call me a control freak (and/or an Emacs freak :-)
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