On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Sam Varshavchik wrote:

Well, I've been running courier for almost 2 weeks as the mail server for a fairly large group of users and I can certify that 98% of these bounces are junk. However, the remaining 2% are a bit problematic. I have a bunch of users who are not that comfortable with computers and who won't know what MIME is if it kicked them in the ass. Incidentally, many of such users happen to be the ones you want to keep happy (old professors, for ex.). An unsuspecting user pastes something from MS Word onto his Eudora screen and expects it to work... but it won't. It is obviously a stupidity of the mail client in question (and it can be easily fixed by tinkering with a couple of menus), but many users panic when this happens and you don't want to receive too many panicked phonecalls. BTW, you think the fact that Eudora would, in some cases, leave some characters unencoded is stupid? -- check this out: your relaying-denial message "550-This message contains 8-bit characters... etc. etc." spans 4 lines. Eudora only shows you the last one! So in this particular case, when courier refuses to relay your non-compliant message, all you see on your screen is "550 for more info". Good one, huh? :)

Don't get me wrong, I actually like the fact that I'm bouncing most of this junk and I feel like I'm part of making the 'net a better place, but I don't want to upset way too many people either. BTW, the problem above can be solved by tinkering with the Eudora settings -- but there's a bunch of old professors on the outside trying to send mail to my old professors too... So I'm really weighing my options -- "making the 'net a MIME-compliant place" vs. "keeping your users happy".

Also, a purely hypothetical question: suppose there was this one guy I barely knew who's considering disabling the 2 MIME-checking functions in submit2.C, just to experiment and see what's going to happen; is there anything catastrophic you can think of that might happen to this badass because of this?

-L.