What's the point of /mime email ?!

From several mailing lists which previously posted good plain
text mails, I now receive [apparently crappy] mime format:
like with line terminators [apparently random] showing
'=0D=0A' ..etc.

Q1 - what's their point of not just continuing to use plain text ?

Q2 - how can I decode it after d/l ie. without changing my
'fetch' programs ?

'apropos mime' only showed smime, which talks about
encrypting, which doesn't apply.

Thanks for any advice on how to fix this spam-like problem.

== Chris Glur.

problems@gmail wrote:
> From several mailing lists which previously posted good plain
> text mails, I now receive [apparently crappy] mime format:
> like with line terminators [apparently random] showing
> '=0D=0A' ..etc.

Very annoying.

> Q1 - what's their point of not just continuing to use plain text ?

Probably none except that they switched to using new publishing
tools that do all the whizbang stuff and that's how they encode
plain text so it would be conformant on the off chance that someone
put in something outside of the strict ASCII range.

> Q2 - how can I decode it after d/l ie. without changing my
> 'fetch' programs ?

Not sure of it's current state etc. but "metamail" will decode
mime messages.

problems@gmail writes:

> From several mailing lists which previously posted good plain
> text mails, I now receive [apparently crappy] mime format:
> like with line terminators [apparently random] showing
> '=0D=0A' ..etc.
>
> Q1 - what's their point of not just continuing to use plain text ?

Dunno (how can I? I've got no idea what mailing lists you're talking
about, nor their subject matter, nor what people want to post). But,
mime-encoding allow attachment of other media -- images, videos,
sound.... and it does it without much overhead (unlike the
abomination that is html mail).

> Q2 - how can I decode it after d/l ie. without changing my
> 'fetch' programs ?

Generally, this is done in your mail user agent. I use vm (versatile
mailer) from within emacs, which handles it very, very well. I'm
actually curious to learn what you use to read your email that it
doesn't take care of it...

> 'apropos mime' only showed smime, which talks about
> encrypting, which doesn't apply.
>
> Thanks for any advice on how to fix this spam-like problem.

This is really pretty much completely not spam-like.

On Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:32:30 -0700, Joe Pfeiffer <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>I'm
>actually curious to learn what you use to read your email that it
>doesn't take care of it...

Oberon's mailer apparently (I looked in the header). Nice to come across
another Oberon user...

To original poster: You've got the source, add mime capabilty and let me
have a copy :-)

--
Cheers,
Stan Barr stanb .at. dial .dot. pipex .dot. com
(Remove any digits from the addresses when mailing me.)

The future was never like this!