Re: Stop it with putting your e-mail body in my MUA OT

["David Howe" <DaveHowe () gmx co uk>]

Eric A. Hall <ehall () ehsco com> was seen to declaim:
> Nobody is forcing anybody to adopt it.
I think the point is people with non-compliant maillers delete mails
with attachments and no body on sight... sometimes, in an automated
rule. If you don't care that a percentage of your recipients don't ever
get to see your missives (and/or think you are infected with some sort
of virus) as long as those that use the same software as you do, then
you are in good company - its how most web designers seem to feel about 
Internet Explorer and flash.

> OTOH, complaining to people who use the spec about problems
> with your own mailer is pretty dumb.
As has already been pointed out, just because a standard exists is not a
good reason to use it if there is a more backwards-complaint standard
that does the same job - like clearsigning the message in the body.
As an (extreme) counter-example, there are standards I would be
compliant with if I had decided to start each paragraph with a pretty
illuminated capital (using a gif image), change the font to a nice,
bubbly font in ebcdic order (and include a AOT file for that) and then
wrap the whole thing up in mime multipart/related so that a *compliant*
reader could view it. however, I am fairly sure that would get me booted
from the list *and* would be megabytes of unreadable garbage to most of
the list (it is probably unreadable garbage now, but that is just their
personal opinion of my emails :)
Just because it is a standard, doesn't mean it is appropriate.