Re: forwarding as text rather than MIME?

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>]

Robert Bihlmeyer <e9426626@stud2.tuwien.ac.at> writes:

> IMHO most neat would be a kind of compromise: make the MIME forward
> almost indifferent to a "normal" forward, by setting the
> part-delimiter to "----cut-here----" and similar things.

The delimiter is not the problem; current funny -=-=-=- stuff is not
any uglier than ----cut-here----.  The problem is that:

1) Up to now, you could use `S o p' to create and send purely textual
   messages, suitable for forwarding as well as for "silly" purposes
   such as *.best-of-usenet newsgroups.  The MIME wonder doesn't allow 
   you to do this.

2) Many newsreaders don't handle MIME at all.  This, for one, includes
   all stable releases of Gnus.  Then you get the raw message with not
   only the delimiters, but all the headers, plus the MIME headers.
   The old forwarding routine created much shorter and more readable
   messages.

3) Many newsreaders handle MIME but poorly.  They insist on calling
   "metamail", which is a pain in the $@#$@# for many reasons (I can
   expand on this in a different message).

4) I'm not sure why it's such a good idea to use MIME encapsulation
   for news messages anyway.

All of this doesn't matter to me very much; as I said in an earlier
message, I will likely adapt to Gnus' final design choice.  It's just
that I also see Toni's point in questionning the wisdom of using MIME
for news forwards.

[Not to mention that even the current Gnus handles message/rfc822 very 
poorly.  The only sane way of viewing such messages is through *gasp*
nndoc.]