| gabriel rosenkoetter on Wed, 7 May 2003 07:28:04 -0400 |
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On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 07:12:18AM -0400, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote: > Should people be able to email Postscript documents? > > If so, then why shouldn't they be able to email Microsoft Word > documents? > > If not, then how will your IMAP daemon tell the difference between > plain text and a Postscript document? (Hint: you can't.) Another example: $LANG when the IMAP daemon is started was set to ISO-8859-1. Someone sends a message in UTF-8 without labeling the MIME part (properly or at all; there are plenty of MUAs that misbehave this way). Now, what should the IMAP protocol do with this message? Refuse to retrieve it? With what error message, exactly? What about the fact that the user's MUA (same as the one that produced the non-MIME output, let's say) may be able to read this just fine? The IMAP protocol is following the principle of least surprise here. You want it to deliver your mail to you. You want it NOT to be concerned about the content of that mail. Saying "only 7-bit ASCII text is email!" locks out anyone who doesn't speak English. Any other restriction has similar effect. You just can't do that. -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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