[lojban-beginners] Re: more 'suck'

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

This is so off-topic it's not even funny, but as I've been accused
of threatening to unsubscribe someone for idealogical reasons (an
accusation which I find very offensive), I feel the need to keep
this here.  Those of you who don't care (i.e. almost all of you) can
feel free to skip this mail.  There is no Lojbanic information
herein.

On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 12:54:54AM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
> >>> Furthermore, how would you convert [messages with forbidden
> >>> characters in their headers]?
> >> Convert them?  I wouldn't.  I'd bounce them. Indeed, I *do*
> >> bounce them. [I've been doing it for a while to list mail with
> >> such errors.]
> > Indeed, I had forgotten about that.
> >
> > And you are THE ONLY ONE.
> 
> I don't quite see what that has to do with it.  You appear to
> think that...well, actually, it's not quite clear what.  That
> because nobody else checks for it, that it's not a violation?
> That it's somehow an acceptable spec to ignore, despite all the
> good reasons why such octets are forbidden?

My point was mostly to give you another point of view.  You are,
essentially, asking someone to deliberately mis-spell his name for
your benefit, and yours alone, when no-one else seems to mind.

(By "no-one else", I mean not just the people, but their e-mail
programs.)

While I am aware that 8-bit headers are frowned upon (although, to
be frank, I've never seen a reason better than "they make buffer
overflows easier", which is idiotic), I have yet to see a mail
program that won't happily pass them along, and I've been an e-mail
administrator for essentially my entire adult life.

RFC2047 gives no compelling reason except:

       Like the encoding techniques described in RFC 2045, the
       techniques outlined here were designed to allow the use of
       non-ASCII characters in message headers in a way which is
       unlikely to be disturbed by the quirks of existing Internet
       mail handling programs.

It then goes on to talk about those quirks.  Oh no, some programs
might choke on 8-bit headers!  Clearly the world is ending,
especially since, as aforementioned, I have yet to see one.  Bear in
mind that RFC 2047 was written in *1996*, for Gan's sake!  The world
has moved on!

Jorge's e-mail client is Yahoo.  He has very little choice in the
matter (trust me on this; I spent some time working with him on it).
If you're really so bothered by something that every MTA and almost
all MUAs seem fine with, talk to them, as they are the ones who
aren't encoding the stuff properly.

Refusing to receive e-mail that almost all mail programs can deal
with just fine is not a step forward, it's a step back.

Furthermore, my list handling program, ecartis, has no flags for
blocking 8-bit headers; even if I wanted to, I could not do so
without actually digging around in (very complicated) C code.

> > It's very obnoxious; please stop.
> 
> No.
> 
> If it's really that important to you, so important that you demand
> subscribers' mailers wave off gross syntax errors in list mail, I
> guess you'll just have to unsubscribe me.  

Straw man.  I never even suggested such a thing.  If the difference
between "please stop" and "stop or I'll kick you off the list" isn't
obvious to you, umm, I can't help you.

-Robin

-- 
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/
Reason #237 To Learn Lojban: "Homonyms: Their Grate!"
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