On Fri, 19 Jun 2020, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote: > > It's time to adopt a platform that can handle modern mail. Some may still > > choose a degraded experience, but everyone is entitled to their own fetish. > > Any old mail client can read "modern mail": MIME is designed to be > backwards-compatible and the text parts readable on non-MIME clients. One > quickly learns the ASCII renderings of important non-ASCII characters after > using such a client for a while. (How do I know this? I still use trn, which > doesn't understand character sets at all. There are *no* "modern" newsreaders, > apart from the occasional kitchen-sink monstrosity which does nothing well.)
I guess depending on how you define "modern". For instance (AL)PINE does handle UTF-8 (your UI might not however, if you run say on a VT220), which fulfils my definition of modernity, and it happens to have handled NNTP as well, since time immemorial. I have stopped participating with Usenet due to the lack of NNTP servers I could access, but I used to use PINE in this manner for years, and it did the right thing there. I continue using ALPINE for e-mail and I'm quite happy with the stuff it keeps away from me. An occasional PDF attachment I can deal with. And I can pipe a Git commit being read directly to `git am' with no fuss and no need to bother if it has been encoded in any way for transport. > The "no attachments" rule on many mailing lists is not a Luddite thing, but a > quality filter. There is a strong inverse correlation between those who feel > that they can't communicate without images and fancy text formatting, and > those > who have something useful or interesting to say. Less is more, and all that. Sure, there's always `uuencode' when you do need to post that non-text piece (which I guess will keep the eyes of Luddites away from it too). Maciej
