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On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Tim Gruene <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> allows MIME attachments, even though I also conside MIME outdated and am
> extremely glad I do not need to fiddle with uu-en/de-code anymore.

As you no doubt know, MIME is a collection of Internet standards which
allow binary content such as images, movies, program executables, MTZ
files etc (and viruses of course!) to be encoded as an e-mail
attachment using 'base64' encoding.  It also provides an e-mail
standard which among other things allow multiple versions of a message
to be sent so that the e-mail client is free to decide which version
it's best able to display, and to encode characters absent from the
7-bit ASCII set, such as those used in languages other than English.

Without MIME you wouldn't have any of this, so if it's outdated then
I'm not clear what you are proposing to replace it with? - unless of
course you're referring to 'yEnc' (the Usenet binary encoding standard
that replaced uuencode - but even this would probably be best
incorporated into MIME rather than replacing it).  I'm happy to accept
that none of the additional features that MIME provides is strictly
necessary for the BB, but I think you would have a hard time
persuading users to switch to another method (assuming there is one!)
for sending their attachments, non-English text etc.

Uuencode/uudecode was the pre-MIME (and pre-yEnc) method of binary
encoding and has nothing to do with MIME.

Cheers

-- Ian