
Ed, as usual, makes a very good point.

One time a friend of mine at Sun sent me an e-mail.  He composed it using the
Sun OpenWindows 3 "mailtool" which handles (non-MIME) "attachments" and the
like.

Since I don't use "mailtool", I had to manually save it, cut & paste, and
then "uudecode" the actual attachment.  What I got - after a not-inconsiderable
amount of time spent doing this - was an audio file.  The original message
was over 32Kb of mail headers and uuencoded data; the resulting audio message
was a single sentence that I transcribed as a 135 character message.

If he had sent me the sentence in plain text, the e-mail would have been
around 250 bytes, and it would have taken me about 3 seconds to process it at
most.  Instead, it was 32k and it took at least a minute.  A complete waste of
(my) time and bandwidth, as far as I'm concerned.  Sending plain text is still
the most efficient method of transmission, given the same transport mechanism.
I shudder to think what would happen if everyone started posting their Usenet
articles as audio files instead of plain text!  Meltdown of the Net predicted!
Film at Eleven!

Back to Mono!	(-:

[This sub-thread no longer has anything to do with PEM or administrative]
[policy, so I've redirected followups back to comp.mail.mime ... - Greg ]
