[odf-discuss] Thomas and Daniel's emails

[Jerry Askew]

Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Saturday 18 November 2006 16:09, Jerry Askew wrote:
>   
>> To a mail reader, hierarchical translates to encapsulated, and
>> encapsulated means "attachment".  Accordingly, some mail readers will
>> choose to flatten this structure and display any type that it can inline
>> and just attach the rest.
>>     
> ...
>   
>> Maybe configuring the listserv to not add the footer would help?
>>     
>
> The resulting structure is completely RCF compliant.
>   
Absolutely, and the readers are compliant as well.  The RFC is 
unfortunately vague in this area.
> All modern mail readers can cope with it just fine. Only really old ones (or 
> buggy new ones, I guess) can't.
> There is no excuse for a mail reader to not follow the spec,
The readers are following the spec, albeit a lazy interpretation of it.  
The only excuse for it is it keeps the lazy developers busy so that the 
good ones can work on ODF :)
> I certainly hope we don't have to adjust the way we send emails.
>   
Only if you want everyone to read them ;-)

Seriously, though, consider what MIME multipart does to digests and 
archives.  IMHO, mails to listservs should be plain text (or text/plain 
in MIME speak).  Most listservs will handle HTML (i.e. 
multipart/alternative with both text/plain and text/html parts) because 
it is so common.  Anything more than that runs the risk of being left 
encapsulated, un-decoded and relatively inaccessible.
> Remember, there are good email clients that you can download at no cost.
>   
Indeed there are.  For everyone else, there's Microsoft.
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