[rescue] Corrupted list messages
Mouse
mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Thu Sep 30 08:30:19 CDT 2021
> 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.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
More information about the rescue
mailing list