Re: Zmailer and Majordomo troubles

Albert Cahalan (albert@ccs.neu.edu)
Sat, 23 Mar 1996 14:17:54 -0500 (EST)

> > =A0I wonder why all my mail from the linux mailing list goes
> > through erm1.u-strasbg.fr ? If mailers which don't announce
> > themselves as 8BITMIME are frowned upon, and "punished" with QP,
> > why are they used as exploders then?
> >
> >I needed exploders, and I needed them badly. So any piece of crap
> >machine that was willing to push mail for me I accepted, no questions
> >asked. It was important to get vger running smoothly asap.
> >"convenience" items like 8bitmime etc. was secondary for the decision
> >making.
>
>  If this convenience is secondary, why then does vger's zmailer try to
> "punish" erm1 for the lack of 8bitmime? Take your pick: either
> consider strict mime compliance as a must, and then don't use those
> "crap machines" as exploders, or else consider strict mime compliance
> as optional, and then don't mangle 8 bit messages. Just don't have it
> both ways :)

I would be very happy if someone would run an exploder that

1: converts QP into plain 8-bit text
2: converts MIME base-64 to uuencode
3: removes all other traces of MIME data corruption
4: strips the damn high bit

ASCII rules. It is a subset of RTF-8, Latin-1, Latin-2, Mac, PC-8...
Everyone should use ASCII. Guess what? ASCII is a _superset_ of
what you need for ANSI C. What if my mailer sent everything to
you after trigraph conversion because your sendmail does not tell
mine something like TRIGRAPH_NOT_REQUIRED? ASCII even supports
things like _underline_, *boldface*, /italic/ and large:

## #### #### # #
# # # # # # #
# # #### # # #
###### # # # #
# # # # # # # #
# # #### #### # #

###### #### ##### ###### # # ###### #####
# # # # # # # # # # #
##### # # # # ##### # # ##### # #
# # # ##### # # # # #####
# # # # # # # # # # #
# #### # # ###### ## ###### # #

I think everyone should be happy that there is a fine characterset
called ASCII that is compatible with damn near everything.
I hate it when everyone thinks they need a different characterset.
ASCII is _the_ standard. Anything else is not. Maybe you could
read this in EBCDIC or ISO 31-bit? Maybe C= 64 encoding, with
the uppercase and lowercase reversed? There has to be a standard,
and ASCII is that standard. Before MIME there was ASCII. ASCII
will exist until the end of charactersets. Since ASCII satisfies
every need (with uuencode+gzip), you should be happy too.

My standard was there first, and C complies with it.