Re: Re[2]: Will the real uuencode please stand up?

[Ned Freed <NED@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>      It has been my impression that many MIME vendors have had to add
>      support for this capability due to the very strong demand of their
>      customers.  This is certainly the case for us - in spite of the fact
>      that we strongly discourage the use of UUENCODE for any file types, we
>      have found that a large portion of our user base depends upon this and
>      actually prefers it over the "official" alternatives.
     
I would have agreed with this assessment until recently. Now my users are
starting to run into problems with UUENCODE -- uncompatible versions, getting
trashed by gateways, MIME systems that don't support it, and so on. We're now
in the position of saying, "We told you so".

>      At the risk of bringing up an old argument, based upon what we now
>      know of the real world demand for this type of compatibility, does it
>      make sense to re-address some of these issues?

Not on your life. This is playing out even better than I had hoped, and I most
certainly don't want to change the standards to say that UUENCODE is
acceptable. This is my trump card.

>      Perhaps it might make
>      sense to optionally support UUENCODE within MIME, and then all of us
>      that have to support this, can at least come to agreement on a common
>      way to label things.
     
The labelling has caused zero difficulties for us. The only real problem here
is UUENCODE itself, and it is unfixable.

				Ned