Re: Sending attachments

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> Could you please post a list of the features you had in mind, so that
> the effort could be estimated?

Important things:

  1. Proper handling of non-ascii text. For instance:

      a. Proper encoding of non-ascii headers (using "=?" notation)
      b. Ability to use other transfer encodings besides 8-bit
      c. Ability to automatically choose different character encodings
         depending on the language/context/whatever (e.g., for many
         cases, the "standard" isn't utf-8).

  2. Ability to have both text and binary attachments (both are very
     important), and that these work together with the language support
     in part (1).

  3. The ability to handle the various quirks of sending netnews as
     opposed to email (they're similar in many ways, but obviously not
     all).

     [This presumes that we're looking at _replacing_ the current
     duplicated infrastructure with something new/better -- if the
     non-trivial effort is to be spent to make mail-mode really do email
     correctly, it would be dumb to retain message-mode just for
     handling netnews!]

Of course, message-mode already does all this properly.

My observation has been that there are lot of corner cases, and a lot of
software screws them up.

It would be very very useful to have some of the guys that actually work
on message-mode involved in this conversation, because they probably
know this stuff in much more detail -- I only know what I use as a user,
and have had problems with in the past.

-Miles


p.s. A probably unrelated problem, which made testing a bit annoying:
I can't actually send _any_ mail with mail-mode, because my ISP's
mail-forwarder rejects any messages generated with it!  I'm not quite
sure what extra headers or whatever message-mode adds, but I have no
problems with mail sent using message-mode...

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