Errors-to: epmdf@YMIR.BITNET
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Date:         Wed, 12 Aug 92 21:51:44 GMT
From:         "Donald L. Nash" <D.Nash@UTEXAS.EDU>
Subject:      RE: two minor points
X-To:         info-pmdf@YMIR
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.pmdf-l

>You already have MIME-compliant user agents. PMDF-MR is fully MIME
>compliant and it makes any Message Router user agent into a MIME user
>agent. In other words, ALL-IN-1 MAIL (MailWorks) and to a lesser extent
>ALL-IN-1 IOS are MIME compliant.

Oh yeah, I didn't think about MailWorks.  I'm one of those who would rather
eat soap...

>As I pointed out in my earlier message, the use of MIME for return messages
>is a recommended practice now. This means that regardless of what PMDF does
>you are going to start seeing these things in huge numbers in the very near
>future. And nothing in PMDF can change this.

In that case, rather than railing against PMDF I'll rail against this
recommendation.  I understand the need to get MIME deployed, but pushing its
use before the MIME UAs are fully deployed sounds like it's rushing things
just a bit.  I know that there are some MIME UAs out there, but they aren't
in wide deployment yet.  And until they are in wide deployment, sending MIME
return messages doesn't accomplish much except to annoy and confuse some
people.  However, it is a "recommended practice" now, and my railings in
info-pmdf aren't going to change that, so I'll just shut up about the
subject and wait for you folks to finish your UA.

>The reason you're posting to us is twofold -- we got there first, and we're
>more likely to listen to this sort of issue than most vendors. But I
>predict that six months from now the actions PMDF takes in these situations
>will be entirely irrelevant.

Actually, the reason I was posting was because I wanted to vent my feelings
on the matter.  I'm not asking Innosoft to retrofit a hack into PMDF to
allow its MIME support to be disabled.  I'd rather you spend you time
working on the UA.  As for what happens six months from now, I'm hoping to
have a MIME UA on my VAX by then.

>We didn't have the resources to do much else in our initial release. Now,
>we can at this point continue to devote the resources to development of a
>MIME-compliant UA or we can divert these resources into a cheap hack with a
>useful life expectancy of about a year (at most). Which direction would you
>choose? Would you rather get a MIME-compliant UA or the ability to generate
>non-MIME return messages (a capability which, I might add, would have to be
>REMOVED COMPLETELY at some future date).

Like I said, I don't want the cheap hack and I wasn't asking for it.  I was
simply lamenting the absense of a feature which I admit would be too costly
to add at this point in time, but which would have been nice given the lack
of a MIME UA.  Just gimme the UA and I'll shut up. :-)

>Development of V4.1 was done on the assumption that the user agent would
>probably ship with it. Various choices were made which, had we considered
>nonexistence of the UA at this time, might have been done differently. The
>bottom line is that s**t happens.

Yes, and it happens all too frequently.  I didn't know that the UA was
originally intended to ship with V4.1.  Given this information, the complete
support for MIME in V4.1 makes perfect sense.  Now the only thing I have
left to lament is the fact that the UA didn't make it into V4.1.

Thanks for listening.  That's something that lots of vendors don't do very
well.

                                ++Don
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU