Actually, Lotus still does not support MIME within their cc:Mail
gateway. Our company is one third part gateway supplier that does
however, and the message that we've been hearing loud and clear from
our customer base is to support uuencode - or no sale. Now, I
personally agree with many of the other posts regarding how much we
all like and love dealing with uuencode, however it is here with us,
will continue to be for some time, so we can either figure out a way
to deal with this ugly beast in hopefully some compatible way, or
continue to have interoperability problems.
Tim, the problem is that what you proposed -- standardizing UUENCODE in some
way -- doesn't help at all. Let's suppose we do standardize UUENCODE in some
form or other. Fine. Now what? Is this going to change the fact that there are
dozens of different and mutually incompatible versions of UUENCODE in use
today? Is it going to prevent UUENCODEd material from getting hopelessly
mangled when it passes through some environments? Is it going to encourage any
sort of transition to standard encodings. In fact it will do nothing of the
sort -- if anything it gives them added legitimacy to continue along the
nonstandard, incompatible, and problematic paths they have already chosen.
It is fine with me if someone wants to write an informational document about
UUENCODE, its various versions and incompatibilities, and how best to deal with
it in a MIME context. I don't think it is a very useful thing to do, but I
have no problem with it being done. However, doing this is a huge amount of
work. Dealing with all the various versions of UUENCODE in code form is more
than enough for me, thank you -- I prefer to use the limited time I have to
devote to RFC writing working on things I perceive as being more useful.
Ned