Future of cctalk/cctech

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Fri, 19 Jun 2020, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:

> > 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.)

 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.

> 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