At 11:01 PM 10/10/2004 -0700, william(at)elan.net wrote:
As far as your protest about possible problems for devices that cant
handle MIME, I do not think its a strong point and I'm guessing it would
apply to less then 0.0001% email messages. In fact I'm betting it would
apply to 10,000 less cases than if we use your preferred DomainKeys
which signature breaks with all mail lists or if we use SPF which breaks
forwarding (but forwarding servers are more central and easier to upgrade
then all mail lists).
I am 100% sure that you are pulling your numbers out of thin air. When
you have some real data, please let us know.
I did say I was "guessing" and I'd love to get real data myself. I did
check my mailbox and out of last 10,000 messages in it I found 17 that
did not contain mime-version header - that is very very low number.
I did a similar check and found 17 messages on this mailing list (all from John
Levine :-) ) that did not contain mime-version headers. But my archive of the
ASRG list, ~3000 messages since last November sometime, had 556 messages
without mime-version. ietf-mxcomp (MARID) had 247 out of 4306 since 4/20
without mime-version.
The issue here might not be whether the messages contain mime headers, but
whether the body still looks like a non-mime message. I don't tend to think of
text/plain, us-ascii messages as being MIME-encoded, even though there may be
a mime-version header there. The ones I think of as MIME-encoded are multipart
messages or those encoded with other than plain ASCII where the body looks
different (separators, etc.). Perhaps others share that view of what's
MIME-encoded and what's not.
-Jim