Mailing List Etiquette was freebsd vs. netbsd

[RW]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:11:07 -0700
Donald Wilde wrote:

> GMail appears to accept MIME, and I can see embedded MIME tables,
> etc., but the non-text stuff doesn't survive the reply-quoting process
> very well.

You are confusing MIME with HTML.  

Without MIME, email is just ASCII headers, an ASCII text body and a
few kludges. 

What the article is mainly referring to is MIME sections and
encodings. If a client doesn't support sections you may see things like:

----11F4010BD64A7DDD4A964F0B
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

in the body. Plain text with a Content-Transfer-Encoding that hasn't
been decoded can be harder to read or unreadable. 

Any modern client really should be able to read MIME, it's been around
for nearly 30 years.  Using a client that doesn't support it is just an
affection these days. 

HTML is something that can be encapsulated in MIME. It's a very
different matter. 


> Actually, given that the output of the quoting process is very usable
> indented plain text, I think Google did a very good job considering
> that GMail is a free service from a commercial, for-profit company.

You can use gmail with a separate email client if you like. The
servers support pop/imap/smtp.