19 Jun
2020
19 Jun
'20
12:31 p.m.
On Fri, 19 Jun 2020, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:
I guess depending on how you define "modern". For instance (AL)PINE does
handle UTF-8 (your UI might not however, if you run say on a VT220), which
fulfils my definition of modernity, and it happens to have handled NNTP as
well, since time immemorial. I have stopped participating with Usenet due
to the lack of NNTP servers I could access, but I used to use PINE in this
manner for years, and it did the right thing there.
I continue using ALPINE for e-mail and I'm quite happy with the stuff it
keeps away from me. An occasional PDF attachment I can deal with. And I
can pipe a Git commit being read directly to `git am' with no fuss and no
need to bother if it has been encoded in any way for transport.
It's time
to adopt a platform that can handle modern mail. Some may still
choose a degraded experience, but everyone is entitled to their own fetish.
Any old mail client can read "modern mail": MIME is designed to be
backwards-compatible and the text parts readable on non-MIME clients. One
quickly learns the ASCII renderings of important non-ASCII characters after
using such a client for a while. (How do I know this? I still use trn, which
doesn't understand character sets at all. There are *no* "modern"
newsreaders,
apart from the occasional kitchen-sink monstrosity which does nothing well.) The "no attachments" rule on many mailing
lists is not a Luddite thing, but a
quality filter. There is a strong inverse correlation between those who feel
that they can't communicate without images and fancy text formatting, and those
who have something useful or interesting to say. Less is more, and all that.
Sure, there's always `uuencode' when you do need to post that non-text
piece (which I guess will keep the eyes of Luddites away from it too).
Maciej