Re: Why is MIME hard?

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

Girish Kulkarni <geeree@gmail.com> writes:

> I know this has been asked here many times before, but I'd be glad if
> someone explains in a less esoteric manner.
>
> I recently started reading my mail in Emacs and tried VM in XEmacs
> 21.4 and Rmail in GNU Emacs 21.1.1. While I have settled on Rmail for
> last couple of weeks I found that the lack of MIME support was
> bothering me.
>
>  0. How can I receive messages with MIME? (Attachments, HTML
> messages, ...)
>  1. How can I send messages with MIME? (basically attachments)
>
> The oft-quoted page http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/~trey/emacs/mime.html
> seems to have stopped existing and I have been through the Emacs MIME
> manual. But the real reason for posting this here is my inability to
> guess a philosophy behind making MIME so hard in Emacs. Can't it be
> any simpler? Also, someone commented on comp.mail.mime that I had to
> "let go of Rmail and use Gnus or Mew instead" if I wanted MIME. Is
> that really so?
>

I use VM with no real problems. However, to your wider question, I think
the problem is that the MIME standard seems to be open to interpretation or
some some vendors just ignore the standards. For example, I regularly get
HTML e-mail messages that do not rendor correctly. However, when you look
at them, almost 100% of the time, they violate some aspect of the MIME
standard (at least in my interpretation of the standard - and I guess that
proves part of my point). Recently, I have had problems with Apple mail
attachments, but they appear to be doing some strange stuff with their
attachment handling (it is embedded inside the html part of the mail
message - so if your configured like me to prefer the text version, you
can't easily access the attachment (this is fixed in dev VM)).

As the standard seems to be open to interpretation and as some vendors just
ignore it anyway, writing and maintaining a mail reader that is able to
read all the various formats and which is maintained in a timely manner and
can keep up with new versions/interpretations etc, is not a trivial task. 

I run mew and VM and find that they do OK. The latest version of VM seems
to handle apple mail attachments (Mew still seems to have problems). 

I guess the issue isn't so much that it is hard, but mrore that there are
not enough people available for all the various mail readers supported
under Emacs to keep all of them up to date. I don't know what the situation
is with rmail, but believe it can be configured to handle nearly all 'well
defined/implemented' mail extensions, but possibly won't handle those that
are not MIME compliant (in the stricter sense). 

Tim

P.S. Please don't encourage HTML mail - it is a curse that should be
forever relegated to the "Bad idea" bin!


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au