Mail with attachments - No Audi

[Fringe Ryder <fringe@fringeweb.com>]

I missed the earlier thread, but your message would certainly inspire me to
call you a dork, if I knew you well enough to know you'd take it friendly.
Instead, I'll answer your question of why you should constrain yourself to
a lower denominator.

Attachments are done using MIME, which essentially uuencodes the attachment
and appends it to the end of the message.  This has several side-effects:

1) Your email-reading program won't know if there are any attachments until
it reads the first few lines.  There aren't any programs I know of that can
download just the first few lines.

2) That also means you have to download a HUGE email when you only want a
bit of text.  And then scroll to the bottom of the uuencoded garbage.

3) If you really want to post attachments for the list, it is much better
manners to put them on a web page somewhere and reference it.  If you don't
have access to your own web-page, suddenly you are the archaic one.  See,
this gives us the OPTION instead of the REQUIREMENT of downloading your
images.

Hope this helps you understand the ire.  Regards

>From: "Dupree, Robert A." <rdupree@Sidley.com> 

>Phil,
> I am assuming you are including me in the "dork" statement.  I
>apologize for your inconvenience it was not intended to harm your pocket
>book.  It does seem a little extreme to call me a dork.
>
> One question however, is it reasonable for the limitations of your
>e-mail system to determine how the list should operate?  I have heard from
>quite a few people that the attachment worked fine, so this is a serious
>question.  I don't want to start a war (maybe too late) but instead of
>forcing all of us to conform to the lowest standard why not just opt to not
>open messages with attachments?