I probably *can* support it, but will not. This doesn't mean
that you cannot. I just don't want to see it in a MIME specification.
So to all other implementors, please just don't SAY anything about it.
This is the type of attitude that I think will continue to cause us
nothing but trouble. Sure, we can all just hide our heads in the
sand, however this will not cause the problem to go away.
Please don't think that my comments here are in technical support of
uuencode - personally I don't care much either way. I've yet to have
any problems personally (after > 12 years of use), however I do
understand this is not the universal experience.
I think that this group has agreed that technically the use of
uuencode is not a good thing. I believe that it has also been
demonstrated that due to the demands put on us by our respective
customers (the real world), we can conclude that this beast is not
going to go away, regardless of how much we wish it so.
So, what are we going to do? If we continue to ignore the situation,
we will also continue to have potential interworking problems since
there are no well defined ways to send this data. We all seem to be
talking among ourselves about how we want to specify uuencoded
attachments, however nobody want's to talk about it "officially".
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I don't see how we can have it
both ways - we either have to address this issue or not.
To start with, can we figure out some forum or document we can all
point to (it does not have to be MIME), where we can at least agree on
a way to label such attachments? For those more knowledgable about
uuencode, is there a way where we can identify a version of uuencode
that is less likely to cause problems when running through problem
transports?
... one has to put up with a little ugliness sometimes
to keep those dang users happy. For better or worse, the CTE solution was
chosen by some implementors and has become entrenched. I'm not trying to
defend their decision, merely living with it.
This is precisely the position we find ourselves in as well. We
certainly don't like it either, however keeping the customers (users)
happy is fairly importantant to our bottom line... :-( :-)
Best Regards,
Tim Kehres
International Messaging Associates Ltd