Re: McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>]

Timothy C. May says:
> -- Netcom doesn't give me a convenient way to bypass the dial-up
> terminal emulators (PPP and SLIP are no longer offered by Netcom)
> 
> -- Local Internet providers (ScruzNet, SenseMedia) are not, last I
> checked, offering e-mail.

Most of the service providers in New York support SLIP customers
running POP clients. The bay area has far more providers than New
York. Surely someone out there can help Tim find a provider that will
give him a SLIP connection and POP and NNTP servers.

> -- The communication issue. What are _others_ using? I could certainly
> use my _graphics_ capabilities in the ways that Amanda and Perry are
> suggesting, and which I do all the time of course, but messages would
> still best be generated with an ASCII terminal environment as the
> intended destination. I note that all of Perry's messages, and most of
> Amanda's messages, fit this ASCII model.

If you are using SLIP, you no longer care about graphics on your end
since the host you are talking to is your own. You would, however,
need to have a MIME capable mailer on your end. I understand that the
commercial version of Eudora is o.k. in this regard but not great --
it will let you deal with the stuff but not as cleanly as something
like NeXTMail would have. However, since you are going to have to go
in that direction eventually anyway I'd suggest that moving to using
your computer as a host and not as a very expensive VT102 clone is the
way to begin.

> Finally, Amanda mentioned "being away from out desks." Well, many of
> us are _always_ away from our desks when we post. From home machines,
> not from T3-connected Indigos on our desk.

Your Mac is quite a respectable machine -- its handling all your mail
traffic right now without any trouble, and I'm sure it will do just
fine handling everything directly as a host via SLIP or PPP.

> One thing I would like very much is the ability to include simple
> diagrams and drawings in my posts, but this is clearly an _unsolved_
> problem, from a practical point of view. (Before any of you scream to
> me about how this can be done, ask yourself how many people could
> plausibly _see_ the results, given the realities of the Net today, and
> ask yourself where all these posts-with-diagrams are if they're so
> easy to do.)

I'd say that most of us could. Almost no one is using a dumb terminal
-- just terminal emulator software. For those of us with MIME capable
readers (which for practical purposes could be everyone on the list if
they wanted them) you could enclose a set of line drawings with your
messages. If they are simple, they will compress very well and should
not take up very much room.

You are right, by the way, that I post in ASCII. Thats just because I
have no urge to include diagrams and I use Emacs as my mail reader out
of force of habit. If I want to look at MIME, though, I just pop into
another window and type "mhn NUMBER", where NUMBER is the number of
the message I want to view. Its not too inconvenient at all, although
it isn't as "gee whiz" as many people would like. I'm not the sort
that needs "gee whiz" though. I read about a dozen MIME messages a day
at this point, and when MIME ends up being all my traffic I'll rig up
a slightly cleaner interface.

I do send MIME on occassion, by the way, when I want to send graphics,
binary files, or other enclosures.

Perry