[rescue] Corrupted list messages

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 30 Sept 2021 at 13:56, Jonathan Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
>
> But I'm sure if we all used their awful services (including their
> bloated top-posting Javascript-based MUAs)

It is always preferable to know what one is criticizing before one judges it.

They are not all alike.

I am sending a properly bottom-posted, trimmed, plain-text email from
Gmail's web interface. I *pay* for a Gmail account because it is very
useful to me.

I have 4-5 laptops, 2-3 smartphone in active use, a tablet, and a
desktop, plus a work laptop and a work desktop. It is not possible or
viable for me to access my email from all of those devices using a
local client such as Thunderbird (which is my client of choice at
work.) I do not wish to attempt to use a text-mode client over ssh;
that is very inconvenient, whereas I have a native Gmail client on all
3 of my Android devices and on my iOS device. I also have some 5,500
people in Google Contacts, which I have been maintaining
electronically since 1989 when I got a Psion Organizer II -- some 2
years before I bought my CIX email address, which turns 30 this year.
I also maintain personal, and family diaries, and select entries from
my work diary, in Google Calendar. All of this information is synced
all the time to MacOS, iOS, and Android, and is accessible from my
iMac, my mostly-Ubuntu laptops, and my work machines which run
openSUSE.

I am 53 years old and I have a 2 year old daughter. Life is much too
busy already to waste time and effort maintaining and running my own
email server. I do not want to maintain services such as OwnCloud or
NextCloud as they are based in PHP, which I trust about as far as I
can spit a rat.

I do have and run Thunderbird privately, to maintain a local copy of
my Gmail account in case of disaster.

* Do not assume that because someone uses Gmail they are technically
naC/ve or incompetent. They are not necessarily.

* Do not assume that because someone does not run their own email
server, they cannot. I can; indeed I once had active certifications to
prove it. I can't be bothered; it is time I'd rather spend elsewhere.

* Do not assume that your reasons for your choices apply to everyone.
I have tried Mutt/Neomutt and I was using Elm, a forerunner of Alpine,
in the 1980s. They were fine in their day but not now.

* Do not assume that all Javascript email clients are rubbish. They
aren't. I use the one which allows me to send plain-text mail and
bottom-quote properly. I am aware that Hotmail, Outlook and Yahoo
can't do this, which is why although I have B125 year old accounts on
those services, I don't use them and I collect the email into Gmail.

I use what I use after _extensive_ evaluation of over a dozen local
clients and online services. This one serves me very well. I am not
trying to force it on anyone else.

I do, however, feel that after 50 years of email, all systems should
at the very least be able to receive and pass on 8-bit character sets
properly, including at least UTF8-encoded characters.

I deployed corporate email systems in the 1990s and for some of them I
used the CIX service that I still  use myself today. I did so because
at that time MIME-encoded email attachments were not a reliable tech,
whereas CIX's own attachment-handling was near bulletproof across
Win9x, WinNT, classic MacOS, and at a pinch DOS and Linux.

However, that is now over a quarter of a century ago, and I expect any
modern email system to be able to handle that. This does not mean that
I think mailing lists should handle attachments, but nor should they
reject them; I think they should be stripped.

I am firmly against HTML email and formatted email, but again, the
proper thing to do if it is not desired is to accept it and then strip
it, not to reject it.

Some of the more dogmatic members of this thread would do well to
remember Postel's Law.

--
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
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702-829-053