[Alpine-info] Displaying Message/RFC822 attachments fails with IMAP

[Heikki Vesalainen / Ixonos]

Dear Mark,


> To put it in terms that you may understand:


I dare to say I understand protocols enough to not need any analogy 
examples, so let's stick with IMAP. The question here was whether or not 
it would be a good idea for alpine (or any other MUA) to tolerate a NIL 
value in the body-fld-enc field (as if the field's syntax accepted nstring 
instead of just string).

I challange you to come up with a realistic example of an extension you 
might want to make into the protocol in which you would play with the 
difference of nstring and string in the body-fld-enc field. Are you 
perhaps preparing for the higly probable occasion of somebody inventing a 
new encoding called "NIL". Actually even that would not break the MUAs 
that interpreted NIL as "this information is missing, find it out for your 
self".

It seems there is no point in continuing this thread. Generally 
discussions with arguments such as "you don't get it, I've been doing this 
for 30 years by now" are not very fruitful. I thank you for your valuable 
insights and maybe I will some day be as englightened as you are in 
interoperability matter. Most probably not if it means agreeing with your 
current views.

To all the other readers of the alpine-info mailing list, I sincerely 
apologize for the verbal harassment I've caused to be delivered into your 
mailboxes. It has been somewhat off-topic and at times a bit too personal 
for my liking. I hope I am still worthy of using alpine as my MUA.

Heikki