Re: Email and acrimony

["Thomas J. Hawley" tjh@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Paul Williams  on Thu, 22 Jun
2000 10:27:09 +0200

A good reference is "Internet Email Protocols, A Developer's Guide" by Kevin
Johnson; published October 1999 by Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43288-9. Cover
price $44.95, although I found a half-price copy at the Strand. But for the
casual emailer, this is probably more than you want to know.

One of the points Johnson makes is that Internet email standards don't cover
everything. This is particularly true of Mail User Agents (MUAs), a fancy name
for the programs that we use to read and send email. At the MUA level, many
things are left to the design of the particular software.

In a world where there are many different MUAs in use (and this List, in
particular, seems to be such a place) messages that use proprietary MUA
"features", special character sets, etc. are going to result in received
messages that don't resemble what was sent.

So until the day when only Microsoft remains in the software business, it's
good to restrict email to nice low order ASCII (128, not 256) with a MIME
attachment when necessary to include a binary file.



--
Thomas J. Hawley
New York
tjh@xxxxxxxx