On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Tim Gruene <t...@shelx.uni-ac.gwdg.de> wrote: > allows MIME attachments, even though I also conside MIME outdated and am > extremely glad I do not need to fiddle with uu-en/de-code anymore.
As you no doubt know, MIME is a collection of Internet standards which allow binary content such as images, movies, program executables, MTZ files etc (and viruses of course!) to be encoded as an e-mail attachment using 'base64' encoding. It also provides an e-mail standard which among other things allow multiple versions of a message to be sent so that the e-mail client is free to decide which version it's best able to display, and to encode characters absent from the 7-bit ASCII set, such as those used in languages other than English. Without MIME you wouldn't have any of this, so if it's outdated then I'm not clear what you are proposing to replace it with? - unless of course you're referring to 'yEnc' (the Usenet binary encoding standard that replaced uuencode - but even this would probably be best incorporated into MIME rather than replacing it). I'm happy to accept that none of the additional features that MIME provides is strictly necessary for the BB, but I think you would have a hard time persuading users to switch to another method (assuming there is one!) for sending their attachments, non-English text etc. Uuencode/uudecode was the pre-MIME (and pre-yEnc) method of binary encoding and has nothing to do with MIME. Cheers -- Ian
