[TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode

[steffen@sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso)]

Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
 |>|Turning off the HTML text part takes a button click (or took once
 ||i looked last) 
 |
 |No offense taken, but there's no way to turn off the HTML part 
 |when that's the only part--and that is often the case.

It is the decision of the sending party what type of message is
produced, this i hope is still possible even for purely web-based
mail clients.  This sender-side decision i was referring to in the
post quoted above.  Unfortunately your observation is correct, but
luckily on this list, and also on most lists that i read!

But it seems many administrator tools only ever generate HTML or
other rich text log files and statistics, and so on request
generating mails to send these as the main body my MUA will
support in the future (even though very primitive yet, disallowing
additional signature injection, for example).  The world turns,
and integration progresses, and if you don't move you will be left
behind: this is not necessarily something bad.  E.g., on FreeBSD
many tools in the base system now use a XO (i think) library for
generating output, so that the output can be plain text, as
normal, but also JSON or XML, and maybe even binary CBOR at some
future time, and if there is a correct MIME type then why should
Mail not be a valid transport for this, that then can be correctly
decoded on the receiver side according to the MIME content type.
I for one very much prefer plain text in human interaction.

--steffen