Re: A multiple bodypart multiple content type message

["Ned Freed, Postmaster" <NED@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not particularly wedded to the - leaders that are called for by RFC934.
If people feel strongly that a different character, or perhaps a two character
sequence, should be used, that's fine. I'd prefer to avoid : as a leadin
character since I see it at the beginnings of lines far more often than
I ever see -. That's just a personal preference, of course.

However, I think we're putting a lot of emphasis on certain aspects of the
design that don't need to be emphasized. The notion that people without
multimedia mailers are going to have to construct this stuff by hand is
only partially valid. Yes, those people are going to have to do it without
having help from their mailer. However, we're not talking about punched
cards here folks! I don't know about your system, but we plain don't have
any systems around here that don't have a programmable text of some kind on
them. (We have some pretty old garbage floating around here too -- ever
seen an IMLAC and DFED?) Even if some system doesn't have a programmable
editor, they are available CHEAP for just about everything. And any
editor should be able to do simple junk like putting quoting characters on
the lines that need them. That's what I mean by doing it by hand. I'm
not talking about ploughing through the message line by line looking at
it. I'm just too likely to make a mistake, especially on a file that
contains thousands of lines of encoded binary!

Given this criteria, the best way to make it possible for people to
manufacture multipart messages "manually" is to Keep It Simple. Don't
use long complex boundary strings -- you're too likely to mistype them
in an editor and miss an occurence. Yes, such a string is not likely to
occur in text, but it _is_ likely by definition to occur in a nested
multipart document. And (to flog the horse a bit more) don't use line
counts; even some of the better programmable editors don't do line counting
very well, whereas editors tend to be _very_ _good_ at searching for strings.

				Ned