Well, I can make sense of what I can read, but I sure don't like
paying to transfer 56k bytes that I cannot read. I do not wnat to do
this very often, to receive and read a 1k byte message! I can only
hope that this kind of use does not generally explode upon the world
at large without a transition period.
There will of course be a transition period, if for no other reason than
simple intertia. But this kind of use is coming, and you'd best start
preparing for it now, in my opinion. I know I am...
I ceratinly hope that your signature file will not become a regular
50k byte attachment!
I personally don't care for signature files (as you can probably tell by now!)
and I never use them. But a lot of people feel differently about them, and
nobody is going to be able to prevent their use.
Keep in mind that one way to start preparing for big messages is to start
planning on building good gateways. In an environment where people pay for
their mail on a byte-for-byte basis and don't have a lot of fancy equipment
to view fancy formats it is perfectly reasonable to implement a UA-authorized
gateway that deals with multipart/alternative by stripping out the parts that
are incomprehensible within the enclave. Now is an excellent time to start
beating on the gateway designers and implementors to start to plan for this
kind of functionality where it is needed (and there are definitely places
where it is indeed needed).
Ned