It has been my impression that many MIME vendors have had to add
support for this capability due to the very strong demand of their
customers. This is certainly the case for us - in spite of the fact
that we strongly discourage the use of UUENCODE for any file types, we
have found that a large portion of our user base depends upon this and
actually prefers it over the "official" alternatives.
I would have agreed with this assessment until recently. Now my users are
starting to run into problems with UUENCODE -- uncompatible versions, getting
trashed by gateways, MIME systems that don't support it, and so on. We're now
in the position of saying, "We told you so".
At the risk of bringing up an old argument, based upon what we now
know of the real world demand for this type of compatibility, does it
make sense to re-address some of these issues?
Not on your life. This is playing out even better than I had hoped, and I most
certainly don't want to change the standards to say that UUENCODE is
acceptable. This is my trump card.
Perhaps it might make
sense to optionally support UUENCODE within MIME, and then all of us
that have to support this, can at least come to agreement on a common
way to label things.
The labelling has caused zero difficulties for us. The only real problem here
is UUENCODE itself, and it is unfixable.
Ned