Re: Removal of my brain

[billn () pegasus billn net]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Todd Vierling wrote:

> On 9/20/06, billn () billn net <billn () billn net> wrote:
> > More to the point, why punish the entire list by bickering about a
> > minority inability to cope with the fact that some people are different?
>
> It's because some MUAs are dain bramaged.
>
> > The world has more than eight bits.
>
> Which is just one of the reasons that the MIME type
> "multipart/alternative" exists.  Sane MUAs that wish to send HTML also
> send a text/plain alternative segment in the same MIME stream.
>
> The unfortunate part is that this classifies Thunderbird as not
> "sane", because its default configuration for dual-format output is
> "ask me" based on whether all addresses are in the address book with
> the HTML option enabled, rather than simply always sending multipart
> by default.

I can understand that. The point I'm trying to make, is why does Randy 
Bush *need* to make this a community problem, instead of talking directly 
to the user whose mail he cannot read? Why clog up nanog-l and 
nanog-futures over such a trivial issue that can be solved behind the 
scenes with something as simple as a polite query? Better yet, how about a 
polite email to the gang over at Thunderbird? They strike me as a pretty 
reasonable bunch that's open to community input.

A couple of the responses I got to my initial salvo were, in summary, 
'because it's NANOG.' As funny and appropriate as the answers may be, I 
hold up any recovering crack addict as an example. If you know you have a 
problem, and you can do something about it, please think of the children 
and put the pipe down.

Bring back the exploding squirrel threads. Please. They may not have been 
directly operational, but at least they weren't a email flavored rehash of 
vi vs emacs.

- billn