Firsts

It was thus said that the Great John Higginbotham once stated: Not only do I not use Windows, but I don't use the Mac to read me email either. Nor do I use a POP-aware email client. Large emails I can handle, but MIME on the other hand ... "The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!" (WARNING: The following is very seriously "In My Not-So-Humble Opinion." You have been warned 8-) MIME is probably one of the worst things to have been created, especially since there already exists a medium to transfer files through the Internet: FTP (okay, I realize that for Windows/Mac users, sending a file to someone using FTP may not be the easiest thing to do, or even possible). The email standard (at least on the Internet) has always been defined for 7bit ASCII only. Hence UUENCODE or base64 that most files get munged into when being transmitted via email. And that is what I really dislike about MIME - in stead of creating a new 8-bit clean multimedia email/file transport protocol (it's not like there isn't formats already available to do this) people decided to still use the old 7-bit ASCII transmission medium. Sheesh! (Oops, I'm starting to rant. Then again, I tend to do that after reading half-backed standandards documents). But, getting somewhat back to the list charter - the software I use to read email is approximately 10 years old (and in fact, I started using it on machines that are over 10 years old this year) and while it has been patched to recognize MIME, the support is such that it isn't seamless enough to be painless, but enough of it is there to be exceedingly annoying (like driving on the freeway and hitting a brick wall to mix metaphors). Most MIME encoded email I get is simply ignored as it's faster for me that way (unless I get around to ripping MIME support out of my email program). That, and the crap that Microsoft mailers send out (since I'm not using a Microsoft product). Uh, not really. I'm holding onto my Amiga real tight. -spc (Maybe I'll starting sending email out in TeX format ... 8-)