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[NOISE] Microsoft mail app bug (was RE: PCT....)
> Peter,
> Yes, we will be at the W3C meeting.
Good. I look forward to hearing about your proposed protocol.
Clearly, a lot of hard work has gone into it.
> Ad hominem attacks are boring, I won't respond to your next one:
<net.curmudgeon.mode>
I don't regard pointing out bugs as 'ad hominem attacks'.
Your mail software is failing to 'do the right thing'. Since you
are presumably using a Microsoft product (I can't tell from the
headers), it should be within your power to request that it
be fixed, or to fix it yourself.
If Microsoft fails to address this problem. my comments about this
being indicative of Microsoft's attitude towards network standards
and ettiquette will be confirmed. Can you please issue of
Product Improvement Request?
> Why is your message any incentive to me to more fully participate in
> this wg process? Why did you respond to the form of my message
> instead of the content? You added nothing to the evolution of
> security on the Net.
I did respond to the form, with the query as to whether you'd be at the
WG. If a (strongly worded) complaint about bugs in your mail system
is regarded as a disincentive to attend standards bodies, this
indicates with what level of respect MS regards the standards process.
> Note, I HAVE NO WAY TO CONTROL THE ATTACHMENTS. i send my mail though
> our corporate mail system, not MSN, and the @#$% mail app that I use
> insists on adding the formatting info, so I apologize.
So fix it, or switch mail apps. You're making MS look incompetant,
arrogant, or both. If it is really out of your hands, that tells us
something too.
Could you tell us which mail app you are using, so we can avoid
purchasing it?
The comment about MSN is a speculation - I worry that mail sent from
there may have the same bug.
> And since when did UUEncode's become non-standard on the Net?
There are two non-standard practices here:
1. Repeating the entire text of the message, once in standard ascii,
then again in a uuencode of a proprietary format. This unneccesarily
more than doubles the length of the message:
If the ascii text contains all the useful information of the message
(and I suspect that it did), then the uuencoded material is superfluous,
an irresponsible waste of network bandwidth and mailbox disk
space.
If the uuencoded data offered something not available in the ascii,
then the ascii was wasted - and your message should have been
merely a pointer to an ftp or web site where the enhanced text could
have been obtained (preferably in some standard enhanced format
such as postscript or HTML).
2. The standard for attaching an encoded binary attachment to an SMTP
mail message is MIME, and has been for some time. (Usenet news
is still stuck with mostly uuencode, I'm sorry to say.) UUencoded blocks
dropped straight into the mail text work (sort of), but they cannot be
automatically decoded by standard mailers. While individual vendors
can invent some some ad-hoc mechanism for inserting, detecting and
decoding them (which is presumably what is happening here), it's silly
to expect everyone to support a non-standard mechanism. (BTW, the
base64 encoding used in MIME is more efficient than UUencode).
> -Thomas Reardon
> Microsoft Corp
[I've deleted about 70 lines of uuencoded material, which might mean
something to Mr. Reardon's mailer, but is noise to the rest of the
world]
</net.curmudgeon.mode>
I really am looking forward to hearing about PCT on Tuesday.
Peter Trei
Senior Software Engineer
Purveyor Development Team
Process Software Corporation
http://www.process.com
trei@process.com