From: earle@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US (Greg Earle)
Subject: Re: PEM and MIME
Organization: Personal Usenet site, Tujunga, CA USA
Lines: 54
Distribution: world

In article <1qg8m2$2e5@nigel.msen.com> emv@garnet.msen.com (Edward Vielmetti) writes:
>W C Newell Jr (wcn@u.washington.edu) wrote:
>
>>Before we can have a global multimedia e-mail solution, there must be some
>>definition of a minimum service level, and MIME does not provide for this
>>(yet).  
>
>Before the Internet will invest in software, people need to see content. 
>I would suggest that 50 attractive MIME formatted news messages a day would be
>sufficient to get a few people thinking about adding MIME support to news
>readers, esp if the content is really worth it.
>
>>IMHO, we have a long way to go before the Unix-specific MUAs, newsreaders, etc
>>reach the service levels of the other commercial platforms.  There ought to be
>>such a definition, consisting of known object data types and rules for their
>>handling, included in the transport specification document.
>
>Yes.  But there is also a long way to go before most Mac, PC, and Windows
>MUAs and newsreaders are ready to handle the sheer volume of news and mail
>that many Unix specific tools are able to cope with.  When the choice is
>"more feechurs" or "make the damn thing fast enough to keep up with the
>flood", you have to bet that "fast enough" wins.

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 ]

-- 
	- Greg Earle
	  Phone: (818) 353-8695		FAX: (818) 353-1877
	  Internet: earle@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US
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