William ChopsWestfield wrote:

>> WRT viruses, I think they usually come as attachment
>=20
> "Attachments" are a thing enabled by MIME, supporting the original
> assertion that lots of mime emails were viri...

I believe you are referring to "I would say to most of the HTML and all o=
f
the mime encoded email, I receive is SPAM or virus (?)" -- which includes
the affirmation that "... most of the HTML ... email I receive is SPAM or
virus".

The whole issue was about text formatting at first, and then got extended
to include HTML formatting. MIME came also in, but the whole discussion w=
as
still about formatting.

Most users of text mode would not want to miss the ability to send
attachments, so this argument isn't really on the side of text mode (unle=
ss
you really don't want to use attachments).=20

So my point was that it isn't really clear against what or for what Neil
argumented.=20
- Against MIME? He didn't really say that he doesn't use attachments, and=
 I
suspect he does use them. And if we were against MIME, we would have to b=
an
the "=A3" sign also that gets used here once in a while -- and of course =
all
communication in non-English languages. Probably not a big thing for most
people on this list, but the 'net goes beyond the USA and the Commonwealt=
h.
So bite the bullet, MIME is here to stay, as are languages that use
non-ASCII characters. And if you don't want to stay behind, you better ge=
t
an email client that knows how to handle MIME.
- Against HTML? Not much to do with viruses, so what's the point in talki=
ng
about them if HTML is the issue?
- Against Microsoft? Most likely, but not really closely related to
formatting of emails.

I'm surprised that nobody yet has brought up the evil characters beyond t=
he
US English character set... :)  After all, I'm sure there are still email
clients around that don't quite know what to do with "charset=3DISO-8859-=
1"
or the like.

Gerhard

--=20
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