[2010-12-01 23:21] Ken Hornstein <kenh(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com>
Like it or not, MIME messages are a reality in email today. For
example, when my boss sends me email from her Blackberry, it comes
as a text/plain but encoded in base64, which nmh doesn't handle
very well. What exactly am I supposed to do here; tell the person
who decides whether or not I get a raise, "Hey, your email client
sucks, get a better one"? Especially when every OTHER email client
handles this just fine? I doubt she has any idea what base64 is and
quite honestly there's no reason for her to know about it.
MH was written by and for people who have a deep understanding of how email
works, and who want to exploit the capabilities of email to the n-th degree.
These people also tend to be pretty hard core about the fundamentals of
software engineering, one of which is avoiding change for changes sake.
I agree that was true maybe 20-30 years ago, but I am wondering:
What does Marshall Rose or John Romine use as an email client today?
Maybe they still use mh or nmh, but it sure wouldn't surprise me
if they don't (if we've lost Jerry Peek, then the game really IS
over). Hell, I met Brent Welch, the author of exmh, a few months
ago at a conference; he told me that while he still wants to support
exmh, most of the time his email client is PC-based.
But we
do need to think about the email we receive today and how we deal
with it. My mom sends me email today that nmh doesn't handle well;
I don't know what my daughter's email is going to look like, but I
can pretty much guarantee that she's not going to limit herself to
7-bit ASCII :-/ And while I like the nmh gang here just fine, if
I can't use it to communicate with my mom or my daughter, then what
the hell is nmh really good for?
Well said.
I don't know yet if I agree with Markus's proposed changes (I will
confess that I haven't read it completely; that's not due to a lack
of interest, but a lack of time),
I suppose that more of you haven't thought enough about it. This
means mainly the topic and the proposed way (which is actually Jon's
attachment system) to approach it. My implementation might be bad but
I really believe that the approach itself is good.
One advantage that I have by being quite new to nmh: I still can look
at nmh from the outside.
but at least he's starting
a conversation that needs to take place. For that I am grateful.
Thanks. :-)
meillo
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