Re: xplncode and msmail

[holmgrn@xxxxxxxx]

> On many occasions, . . . MSMail interprets
> XPLeNCODEd text as a UUencoded file and converts everything between
> XPLeNCODE V1.8 and the end of the message into an attachment. Said
> attachment cannot be reconverted into text by any means I have found.
> I have missed out on a good many XPL uploads this way! . . .
> My network admin says MSMail 3.0 is hardcoded to uudecode
> automatically . . .  Doug Beeson  beesond@xxxxxxxx

I'm chagrined to hear this. I've had parallel problems with IBM's
Ultimail, which intermittently and unpredictably declines to
process as regular mail any msgs that contain UU- or XX-encoded
text in _any_ part of the text body (but the attachment can be
written to a file and opened by recipient outside his mail
program). Still, Ultimail always transmits
XXBUG scripts and XPLeNCODEd texts without complaint. I wrote
XPLCODE so that half-interested onlookers could parse the XPL and
get the general drift of things without deconversion, whereas
recipients who wanted or needed to go to the trouble could decode
precisely. I must say, I've been wild about XXBUG ever since Tim
Baehr's first upload, because it requires no special tools and
there are versions or facsimiles of DEBUG on every platform (not
just MS-DOS and PC-DOS); but the drawback -- at least in the case
of "open" unprotected code like XPL, accessible to anyone -- is
that you can't eyeball an XXBUG script and learn anything.

Carl Distefano suggests that the problem may be my use of "begin" and
"end" statements, which may signal your mail reader to treat the
subsequent msgs as UUencoded text. This sounds completely
plausible. If you don't object, I'd like to send you a couple of
private msgs containing a different signature. If that solves
the problem, I'll revise XPLCODE.

Anyway, your problem comes of developers omitting smart/stupid
switches in their software. To me, it's symptomatic of the one
big ball of wax, at a crucial moment in time. The philosophical
questions Ken Frank confronts in development of his 'new
processor' are the same ones that MicroSoft faces in its great
migration, away from QDOS-86 (Seattle Computer's Quick-and-
Dirty Operating System hack, which Gates purchased and renamed
MS-DOS) and toward an imitation of the Xerox graphic interface
that Apple resuscitated and shaped into the Mac. Very soon (if
not already) the bulk of users will have no switches to toggle.
Customization will be history, thought will retire behind icons,
and we all know _many_ people who will be happier and far more
productive for it too. But a smaller community will always
retain the real need (& desire) to tweak and tailor apps subtly.
Hence Unix, OS/2, XyWrite, DeScribe. In my view, for some here -- so loud
and gratuitously rude too -- to rule that we may talk about
XyWrite but not about the environment in which XyWrite functions,
and which increasingly shapes XyWrite, just defines myopia.

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Robert J. Holmgren holmgrn@xxxxxxxx
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