[Mailman-developers] forwarded message from Andrew Kuchling

[Ken Manheimer]

John Viega writes:
> [Was it janne? who wrote:]
> > Some other mailers complain about the number of attachments. Over 20
> > seems to be too much for them.
> 
> That's sad.  It is unfortunate that few mailers deal with MIME digests
> decently.  When I added the feature to mailman, I was wondering why no
> other package supported MIME digests. I very quickly learned that it

I'm surprised - both of the outside, only-slightly-techie maillists to
which i subscribe in digest mode are delivered in mime format.  (The
thinkpad list is the one from which i'm stealing my new mime layout
proposal design.)

> is probably because so few mailers support them well if at all.  I got
> so many complaints about the MIME digests that were the mailer's
> fault, that it became really clear to me that MIME digests need to be
> off by default until other mail software improves.  I think Ken
> changed the default in the release, but if I haven't said so before, I
> strongly believe it should be changed back.

John, you mentioned this to me early on - i'm sort of on the fence
about it, and would like to discuss it more - only in the hopes that
the prevailing world may have changed enough to warrant giving
mime-default a try.  I haven't gotten any complaints so far, except
the sendmail problem - which i think is a sendmail problem, not
mime/mailman...  I'm ready to give up on this, though, just giving a
last gasp try, just for the sake of personal preference.  (I *much*
prefer mime digest format, and also much prefer digest to procmail and
mail-reader-sorted collections, both of which i have available.)

Ken