Re: What's needed for mutt 1.6?
* On 2007.03.01, in <20070301102057.ABB4CC3B7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
* "Lars Hecking" <lhecking@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Can you show me one single case where using multipart/alternative is
> justified and actually makes any sense? It's bad enough to receive
> bloated text+html email from clueless Outlook users, I don't want to
> see such mail from mutt users, too.
The principal problems there are "clueless" and "Outlook", not
"multipart/alternative".
I would agree that mutt should not send multipart/alternative by default
when the original material is "flat". That's useless bloat. It happens
because of laziness in the presence of automatic content-generating
misfeatures, but benefiting from this patch requires effort and this
patch doesn't provide the misfeature.
But on to your challenge:
I'm in central IT for my institution. We have a "bulkmail" service
through which staff and administration send out bulletins that they
think segments of the University population need to see. Often they
think they need to see them in MS Word format. We usually can talk them
down to HTML or perhaps text/enriched, but this usually looks like hell
in a terminal, too. Sending multipart/alternative can actually be a
good thing for mutt users, if the text/plain conversion is good.
That's just an example I pulled out my example-pulling facility. In
fact I don't think it's incumbent upon us to justify giving mutt
common-practice features when the only reason not to do it is that
mutt loses some perceived moral superiority. This is like the old
descriptive/prescriptive dichotomy in linguistics. For better or worse,
it's common practice because it's what senders and recipients want, not
because Gates and Ballmer told the Outlook team it would be sell more
units.
I would prefer mutt not to be the contrarian old geezer who smokes a
calabash and tells people it's "I shall, not I will". As much sympathy
as I have for prescriptive rectitude, it doesn't build acceptance, and
acceptance is what mutt needs.
--
-D. dgc@xxxxxxxxxxxx NSIT University of Chicago