[rescue] Corrupted list messages

[Mouse]

> I would suggest that stripping the 8th bit was a not totally
> unreasonable measure in olden days but it may be worth re-considering
> given that it isn't entirely standards complient.

There are standards it doesn't comply with, yes.  But nothing says that
any mailserver has to comply with all potentially-applicable standards,
if it's willing to take the potential interoperability hit.

Given the purpose of this list, I think it's reasonable for it to stick
to ASCII.  I would, though, rather see it reject non-ASCII mail than
just smash the high bits - and if it does just smash high bits, it
_really_ should to do something better than send out mail full of ^S
and ^Y mislabeled as being US-ASCII.

Of course, there's also the question of to what extent the mailer
and/or the list are being maintained.  They are clearly being
maintained _somewhat_, but I don't know whether there are any brain
cycles available for changes.  I'd rather have it stay as it is than
have someone with too few spare cycles trying to "fix" it.

> But I'll admit that I'm in general opposed to messing with message
> bodies.

Me too, possibly excepting things such as MIME recoding from base64 to
8bit (something that happens not infrequently to my incoming mail
stream, and I actually rather like that particular change).

> As email has become more important, PHBs are paying more attention to
> it and it's very often a case of "Don't bore me with all that
> technical shit; just do it." despite the technical shit making it all
> work in the first place.

It then becomes a question of what you interpret "just do it" as being
a mandate for.  I would take it as a mandate to bring the software in
question up to spec, replacing it if necessary.

> I once had someone complain about my in-line replies and trying to
> explain how experienced he was with email; he went silent when I
> pointed out that I'd been doing email since before he was born :)

It _is_ a hard argument to counter. :-)

I also have never had anyone provide a counter-argument to the points I
raise in my blah post on untrimmed top-posting (see
{ftp,http}://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/mouse/blah/2012-09-26-1.html), or
more precisely the text file linked to from there.

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