Subject: this is wonderful!

From: Rick Troth <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1993 13:46:37 -0500 (CDT)

I am very impressed.   Pine appears to be the mail user agent 
for which I've waited for lo these many years.   Me?  I'm hooked 
on RiceMAIL.   But RiceMAIL has one serious drawback.   You need 
either a megabuck box from IBM, Amdahl, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc. 
or at least a P/370 workstation for probably $20K to run it.   :-( 
Too bad.   Y'all would like it. 
 
What editor am I using here?   Is it the Pine PICO?   It's nice. 
 
Couple of things, though.   First,  I gotta urge the developers 
to avoid explicit character encoding names where a character "set" 
name will do.   Look at mine.   Latin-1  is what you probably mean 
when you say ISO-8859-1.   ISO-8859-1 is an ASCII-compatible encoding 
of those characters in the "Latin-1" set.   Latin-1  is valid in 
places where ISO-8859-1 really isn't,  like on CMS.   Latin-1 is 
to CMS  "Codepage 1047",  and that's fine.   But when it says 
CHARSET=ISO-8859-1 and I'm reading it on CMS,  it's a lie. 
 
Also,  avoid  "quoted printable".   If you need safe transfer encoding, 
use  Base 64.   All MIME capable user agents can handle that,  but 
"quoted printable"  breaks much more easily than  Base 64. 
 
Nice job, folx! 
 
-- 
Thanks to the new IBM, most ESA systems today 
can be suspected of being stable. -- Barton Robinson 
 
Rick Troth <[email-masked]>, Rice University, Information Systems

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From: "David L. Miller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1993 13:33:28 -0700 (PDT)

Well, the problem with using "Latin-1" is that it is not in the MIME
standard.  It may be in a follow-on RFC, but it is not in RFC-1341.  Now
if your system cannot handle the ISO-8859-x charset directly, a translation
needs to occur.  I guess my point is that pine has always followed the
principle that the standards should be followed as closely as possible
even if it causes some inconvenience to non-conforming systems.

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David L. Miller                       Internet: [email-masked]
Systems Programmer/Network Analyst      BITNET: MILLERD@WSUVM1
Washington State University Tri-Cities    UUCP: ...!yoda!dmiller
100 Sprout Road                          
Richland, WA 99352                       Phone: (509)375-9245
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