Ned, you don't have to tell me about the people who use Macintoshes, I
have a network full of them. It causes me untold headaches, because all
the UAs and MTAs for Macintosh (with the not terribly surprising
exception of the POP/SMTP-based ones) were designed by idiot mac
programmers, who, while they can make anything pretty, couldn't design
a robust, reliable messaging system to save their lives (and woe betide
the customer who demands support!).
I know you know... I just thought it might amuse you.
It is about what you can expect of messaging systems that are built on top
of a motley collection of fairly unstable file servers.
My understanding is that the IBM PC arena is no better in this regard.
But then, what can you expect from systems whose daily operation is an
exercise in Core Wars?
I am currently hacking up an interface to cc:Mail that can cope with RFC-XXXX.
I could not agree with you more.
I'm glad to hear that you've made the implementation choices that you
have; I'm sure it has saved many a postmaster considerable grief.
However, perhaps it would be good for your documentation to not only
tell why header stripping is bad, but also tell a few war stories of
embarassed institutions, and how the political battle against header
stripping is sucessfully waged by the canny postmaster.
We (Stuart Vance and I) give a session on this at DECUS. We call it "The
Gestalt of E-Mail". It is a very popular session. Eventually we hope to work
up our notes for the session into some other form. We have a LOT of war stories
(some ours, some not). We are ruthless and we take no prisoners. And _everyone_
gets their lumps, including us (I have made my share of stupid mistakes, and
some of mine were real winners).
Ah! Such insurmountable opportunity!
Too bad there aren't more hours in a day.
Ned