* On 2007.03.01, in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, * "Lars Hecking" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Can you show me one single case where using multipart/alternative is > justified and actually makes any sense? It's bad enough to receive > bloated text+html email from clueless Outlook users, I don't want to > see such mail from mutt users, too.
The principal problems there are "clueless" and "Outlook", not "multipart/alternative". I would agree that mutt should not send multipart/alternative by default when the original material is "flat". That's useless bloat. It happens because of laziness in the presence of automatic content-generating misfeatures, but benefiting from this patch requires effort and this patch doesn't provide the misfeature. But on to your challenge: I'm in central IT for my institution. We have a "bulkmail" service through which staff and administration send out bulletins that they think segments of the University population need to see. Often they think they need to see them in MS Word format. We usually can talk them down to HTML or perhaps text/enriched, but this usually looks like hell in a terminal, too. Sending multipart/alternative can actually be a good thing for mutt users, if the text/plain conversion is good. That's just an example I pulled out my example-pulling facility. In fact I don't think it's incumbent upon us to justify giving mutt common-practice features when the only reason not to do it is that mutt loses some perceived moral superiority. This is like the old descriptive/prescriptive dichotomy in linguistics. For better or worse, it's common practice because it's what senders and recipients want, not because Gates and Ballmer told the Outlook team it would be sell more units. I would prefer mutt not to be the contrarian old geezer who smokes a calabash and tells people it's "I shall, not I will". As much sympathy as I have for prescriptive rectitude, it doesn't build acceptance, and acceptance is what mutt needs. -- -D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] NSIT University of Chicago
