Re: forwarding as text rather than MIME?

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:
> Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:

>> It didn't use MIME.  MIME is frowned upon in most news hierarchies.
>> Toni summed it up pretty well.

> *Unreadable* MIME is frowned upon.  I don't think message/rfc822 is
> particularily unreadable.

Not that this is most hierarchies, but as for one particular fairly small
hierarchy, <URL:http://www.usenet2.org/rules.txt> says:

| No binaries: "Usenet is Text"
| -----------------------------
| 
| This isn't 1985. There are plenty of ways to exchange images and
| software without hiding them in text.
| 
| No subhierarchy can allow posts of binaries. If necessary, a separate
| "bin.*" hierarchy will be created for this purpose.
| 
| HTML and other verbose rich text formats are binaries. The only allowed
| MIME types are: none (in which case the message must be in ISO8859.1,
| since there must be a default and that's one that'll cover most of the
| likely traffic), or:
| 
|         MIME-Version: 1.0
|         Content-Type: text/plain; charset=<any>  OR  multipart/signed
|         Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit  OR  7bit
| 
| If the Content-type is multipart/signed, then the parts may be:
| 
|         Content-Type: text/plain
|         Content-Type: application/pgp-signature

At the time we wrote this, there was full justification for being this
strict (and some similar policies are reflected in Cleannews filters and
other similar places).  Nowadays, I think it would probably be worth
letting up on that to a large degree, but in the meantime I know there are
lots of other moderated groups and smaller hierarchies that have set up
similar policies.  A way to revert to the old forwarding method is really
necessary for those places for at least a little longer.

Remember, MIME implementations have sucked so hard to date that everyone's
still in shell shock from them and there are a lot of engrained reflex
reactions.  It's going to take a year or two of available non-sucking MIME
implementations before this will change.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)         <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>