On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Tomas Fasth wrote:
> The point is, once all MTAs does the same thing, presentation will
> improve on MUAs as well.
Agreed.
I have probably neglected this issue for too long. However, there have
been plenty of other things to do. As I announced the other day, I think
I should start to work towards a new release once I get back from
holiday, and this issue requires too much thought to be considered for
that release. However, once that is all over - and I have done some work
on PCRE which is pending - I will try to get back to this whole bounce
message area and make some proposals. I guess that is likely to be in
the first quarter of 2000, but time has a way of running away...
It will probably be hard to work out proposals that keep everybody
(fairly) happy, but it should be tried.
On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> "Your message didn't get delivered as well as you might've hoped. Here's why
> http://mta.mycom.tld/oops.cgi?lang=en&code=552&msgid="
I'm sorry. That would annoy me. Why not *tell* me what happened rather
than indirect me to a (remote) web server that may be down. Contrary to
the general way the world is going, I don't always have a browser
running.
> I meet people who don't see a single use for HTML or non-ASCII in email
> either. Baffling isn't it?
I have to react to that. I see no use for HTML or non-ASCII in email
*when used as a medium for correspondence*. I have no problem with
sending attachments in any form you might want, but if you just want to
send some text to somebody I don't see the point of wrapping it up into
some fancy format, except that it uses more bandwidth and therefore
makes more money for somebody, I guess. Cynical? me? well, yes :-)
Sending, on every message, a fancy "business card" in HTML with a logo
that makes it many times bigger than the actual message is particularly
annoying. I read my email using Pine on Unix. I now never bother to look
at gratuitous attachments in HTML (or anything else, for that matter).
[It's different if the message says "here's an attached
document/webpage/binary for your attention".]
I'm probably an old-fashioned dinosaur (having been around rather a long
time), but I don't like complexity just for the sake of it.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
