Re: mx.gnus.org being very strict

[Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>]

>>>>> Matthias Andree <ma@dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de>:

> Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

>> Yes.  Gateways should just pass bytes along, not try to be smart
>> about it.
[snip!]
>> This being the polite interpretation.  Ask Dan Bernstein for the
>> unsweetened version.

> DJB is not a reference, NIMBY (not in my back yard) principle WRT
> security and fixes and apologies to the own users, deliberate
> standard violation, this doesn't at all help his reputation.

While I do not always agree with Dan Bernstein (or with Per, for that
matter), I have to say I do in this case.  Though I do not agree about
the incompetence of the mail standardization guys, mentioned in the
part that was snipped away.

This goes back to the summer of 1993 when I read the MIME standard,
and started using quoted-printable in emails, on an infrastructure that
consisted of sendmails universally patched to do just-send-8, and a
silently agreement that the charset used should be latin-1.

Suffice to say the feedback I got from people receiving
quoted-unreadable was so _universally_ negative, that I quickly
stopped doing it.  In the eyes of others, things just worked, and I
broke them.

So one thing I never would do, would be to set up an MTA to reject
messages that has 8 bit, but no MIME.  I can't imaging what kind of
standards-obsessed narrowmindedness would make anyone do so.

Wouldn't it be better to take that MX out of the gnus.org zone
altogether?