From: John C Klensin <klensin(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
...
As has been said many times before, text attachments are both
useful and reasonably safe. ...
I could live with prohibiting almost anything else, but banning
multiple-body-part MIME messages where all of the terminal body
parts are plain text strikes me as pretty close to shooting
ourselves in the foot.
Ok, would you support rejecting any submissions containing non-text
attachments?
If not that, then how about length restrictions on all submissions
or non-text submissions?
Or do you think that no censoring at all should be done, and that
those who want it should subscribe to via a secondary list? If so,
you are changing a powerful precedent. As someone else pointed out,
individual people have been banned from this list. If it is now
decided that even viruses cannot be banned, then how could you ever
again ban people?
It has been proposed that submissions to the list be edited into
compliance by deleting some but not all attachments. That would be
wrong because it would violate the spirit of the author's copyright.
The IETF's "NOTE WELL" might make such editing legal, or perhaps not
since it allows derivative works and if you don't publish the original,
how can you have a derivative? Regardless, no matter how much people
say obnoxious, stupid, offensive, or irrelevant things, misspell words,
or otherwise beg for copy editing, their submissions should not be
corrected, fixed, improved or partially censored. Every author should
be respected enough to be published or rejected, completely unedited.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com