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Dear Ian, I did not know correctly and confused it with the pre-MIME era you mention at the very end of your email when we actually had to use uuencode in order to send non-7-bit data by email. Thanks for the clarification, I'll do my homework. Cheers, Tim On Fri, Jul 02, 2010 at 04:54:28PM +0100, Ian Tickle wrote: > 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 allows MIME attachments, even though I also conside MIME outdated and am 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 Without MIME you wouldn't have any of this, so if it's outdated then 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 -- -- Tim Gruene Institut fuer anorganische Chemie Tammannstr. 4 D-37077 Goettingen GPG Key ID = A46BEE1A