[TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Mon Mar 13 04:13:55 AEST 2017


Allowing more or less arbitrary attachments was a real convenience.
But allowing such stuff to serve as the message proper was 
dubious at best. Not only did it require recipients to obtain
special software to read some messages; it also posed a
security threat. 

I still use mailx precisely because it will only display plain text.
With active text such as HTML, it is all too easy to mistakenly
brush over a phishing link. Outfits like Constant Contact do their
nonprofit clients a disservice by sending stuff that I won't even
peek at. And it's an annoying chore when companies I actually want
to deal with send receipts and the like in (godawful) HTML only.

Doug



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