[alpine] multipart quoting of big5 [Was: making posts unreadable...]

[I'm adding comp.mail.pine to Newsgroups:]

In <slrnffffrm.jq.wiegner@dost.mchm.siemens.de>, Thomas Wiegner wrote:

> On 2007–09—24, Thomas Wiegner <wiegner@gmx.de> wrote:

>> Useless use of multipart postings is something which does *not*
>> improve the usenet.

How thoroughly embarrassing.

>> I'm pretty sure it is possible to turn off this braindead default
>> behaviour of alpine (I know it's possible for pain^Wpine)

It appears that in my quoting of a message that used charset=big5, alpine
decided to package my entire message as the only part of MULTIPART/MIXED
message.

(Al)pine's default behavior, as far as I know, has always been to use
text/plain without creating a multipart message.

> UPS, this should have been a reply to
> <alpine.OSX.0.9999.0709240814510.468@hagrid.ewd.go ldmark.org>

That really is odd looking. I don't understand why alpine would want to
create a single part, "multipart" message.

> Anyway, good you changed this.

I did nothing. Apparently it has to do with what kind of stuff I'm
quoting. As I'm sure you've noticed, this message that you are reading
right now is an offender as well. I think that date in your own reply
lead-in is what triggered it in this instance, but I don't why alpine
behaves this way.

Thanks for letting me know about this.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

> > I'm pretty sure it is possible to turn off this braindead default
> > behaviour of alpine (I know it's possible for pain^Wpine)

It appears that in my quoting of a message that used charset=big5,
alpine decided to package my entire message as the only part of
MULTIPART/MIXED message.

(Al)pine's default behavior, as far as I know, has always been to use
text/plain without creating a multipart message.

There is a feature in Pine which controls this. It is disabled in this
case in your configuration. Its help text is below
(x-pine-help:h_downgrade_multipart_to_text). I hope this helps.

FEATURE: Downgrade-Multipart-To-Text

This feature affects Pine's behavior when sending mail. Internet standards
require Pine to translate all non-ASCII characters in messages that it
sends using MIME encoding. This encoding can be ostensibly broken for
recipients if any agent between Pine and the recipient, such as an email
list expander, appends text to the message, such as list information or
advertising. When sending such messages Pine attempts to protect such
encoding by placing extra MIME boundaries around the message text.

These extra boundaries are invisible to recipients that use MIME-aware
email programs (the vast majority). However, if you correspond with users
of email programs that are not MIME-aware, or do not handle the extra
boundaries gracefully, you can use this feature to prevent Pine from
including the extra MIME information. Of course, it will increase the
likelihood that non-ASCII text you send may appear corrupt to the
recipient.

--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/

In <alpine.LRH.0.9999.0709241234320.32001@homer23.u.w ashington.edu>,...:

> There is a feature in Pine which controls this. It is disabled in this
> case in your configuration. Its help text is below
> (x-pine-help:h_downgrade_multipart_to_text). I hope this helps.
>
> FEATURE: Downgrade-Multipart-To-Text
>
> This feature affects Pine's behavior when sending mail. Internet standards
> require Pine to translate all non-ASCII characters in messages that it
> sends using MIME encoding. This encoding can be ostensibly broken for
> recipients if any agent between Pine and the recipient, such as an email
> list expander, appends text to the message, such as list information or
> advertising. When sending such messages Pine attempts to protect such
> encoding by placing extra MIME boundaries around the message text.

Eduardo,

That makes absolute sense for mail. (Al)pine's default before is the
correct choice for mail. The difficulty it seems is that there are a lot
of people using newsreaders that don't do MIME properly.

So I guess what I would want is a

"Downgrade-multipart-to-single-part-when-posting-to-news"

which seems like a lot to ask.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/

In news.software.readers on Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:37:52 -0700, Eduardo
Chappa <chappa@u.washington.edu> wrote:

> There is a feature in Pine which controls this. It is disabled in this
> case in your configuration. Its help text is below
> (x-pine-help:h_downgrade_multipart_to_text). I hope this helps.
>
> FEATURE: Downgrade-Multipart-To-Text
>
> This feature affects Pine's behavior when sending mail. Internet standards
> require Pine to translate all non-ASCII characters in messages that it
> sends using MIME encoding. This encoding can be ostensibly broken for
> recipients if any agent between Pine and the recipient, such as an email
> list expander, appends text to the message, such as list information or
> advertising. When sending such messages Pine attempts to protect such
> encoding by placing extra MIME boundaries around the message text.

There has been no such added text in Jeffrey's posts.

> These extra boundaries are invisible to recipients that use MIME-aware
> email programs (the vast majority). However, if you correspond with users
> of email programs that are not MIME-aware, or do not handle the extra
> boundaries gracefully, you can use this feature to prevent Pine from
> including the extra MIME information. Of course, it will increase the
> likelihood that non-ASCII text you send may appear corrupt to the
> recipient.

I have no problem reading other MIME-encoded posts with slrn.

The problem is that multipart MIME posts are being sent when all
that's needed is a character-set declaration in the headers of a
*single-part* post.

I'll add this:
é
just to see what happens if a pine user replies to this. It would also
be interesting to know what users of other newsreaders are seeing in
the questionable posts, just in case it's really a bug in slrn.

It would be better to test this in a *.test group, but we'd all have
to agree to subscribe to the same one.

--
PJR :-)

In news.software.readers on Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:58:50 -0500, Jeffrey
Goldberg <nobody@goldmark.org> wrote:

> So I guess what I would want is a
>
> "Downgrade-multipart-to-single-part-when-posting-to-news"
>
> which seems like a lot to ask.

Unicode would be preferable, and one day perhaps all these legacy
character sets will die out and stop causing confusion. Does pine
support Unicode, e.g. UTF-8?

Most of your posts cause no problems at all; only the ones that used a
"Big-5" character set (in response to a post that included three
Chinese characters) were messed up.

By the way, is comp.mail.pine a proper place for discussion of pine
when it's used for Usenet, not for mail? I'm wondering, just in case
we get any pine questions in news.software.readers that could be
redirected to pine experts.


Once again, here's an "é". I want to know what happens.

--
PJR :-)

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

Eduardo,

That makes absolute sense for mail. (Al)pine's default before is the
correct choice for mail. The difficulty it seems is that there are a
lot of people using newsreaders that don't do MIME properly.

So I guess what I would want is a

"Downgrade-multipart-to-single-part-when-posting-to-news"

which seems like a lot to ask.

But consider that there could be a "free" news server out there that is
appending stuff (e.g. ads) to free posts and appends these messages
without regards to the charset of the message. Then wrapping makes sense.

I do not claim this is right or wrong. I only claim that this is the way
it works and why it works this way.

--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Peter J Ross wrote:

I have no problem reading other MIME-encoded posts with slrn.

Well, you have found a case where you have a problem reading a
MIME-encoded message with slrn. The question is whose fault is it? lack of
support in slrn? over zealous behavior of Pine? Take your pick.

The problem is that multipart MIME posts are being sent when all that's
needed is a character-set declaration in the headers of a *single-part*
post.

Unless there is a news server that adds advertisement to every post
regardless of charset, then you are right.

In my opinion Pine's behavior is safer in terms of taking care of the
content of the message, but it might be unnecessary for news. I would
choose being cautious, though. I admit that I prefer a world where this
behavior is not necessary, but apparently we can not guarantee that we
live in such world. In fact, this "feature" (or bug, take your pick) came
as a response that the world we live in does not behave properly.

I'll add this:
é
just to see what happens if a pine user replies to this. It would also
be interesting to know what users of other newsreaders are seeing in
the questionable posts, just in case it's really a bug in slrn.

Your test should fail with my message. I have enabled that feature in
Pine, so my messages get downgraded automatically.

--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/

In <slrnffg6m7.7ko.pjr@pjr.gotdns.org>, Peter J Ross wrote:

> In news.software.readers on Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:37:52 -0700, Eduardo
> Chappa <chappa@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>> There is a feature in Pine which controls this. It is disabled in this
>> case in your configuration. Its help text is below
>> (x-pine-help:h_downgrade_multipart_to_text). I hope this helps.
>>
>> FEATURE: Downgrade-Multipart-To-Text
>>
>> This feature affects Pine's behavior when sending mail. Internet standards
>> require Pine to translate all non-ASCII characters in messages that it
>> sends using MIME encoding. This encoding can be ostensibly broken for
>> recipients if any agent between Pine and the recipient, such as an email
>> list expander, appends text to the message, such as list information or
>> advertising. When sending such messages Pine attempts to protect such
>> encoding by placing extra MIME boundaries around the message text.
>
> There has been no such added text in Jeffrey's posts.

No, but when one sends to a mailing list text is added. (Al)pine doesn't
know what will happen to the message after it's sent it off. And because
things do occasionally get appended, it is the right decision to
encapsulate it in its own part.

> I have no problem reading other MIME-encoded posts with slrn.

Apparently slrn can deal with

content-type: text/plain; charset=whatever

just fine. But it is falling down on multipart/mixed, even when the
part(s) are things that it would otherwise be able to cope with. So slrn
is only partially MIME aware.

> The problem is that multipart MIME posts are being sent when all
> that's needed is a character-set declaration in the headers of a
> *single-part* post.

While that might always be safe for news to help out newsclients that
only do MIME halfway that won't generally work for mail for the reasons
quoted (which hadn't occurred to me until Eduardo posted that bit from the
documentation.

> I'll add this:
> é
> just to see what happens if a pine user replies to this.

From what I now understand of how alpine works, this will trigger the
multipart/mixed message.

> It would also
> be interesting to know what users of other newsreaders are seeing in
> the questionable posts, just in case it's really a bug in slrn.

Yes. But I fear that those who are experiencing the problem aren't going
to have the patience to read through the messages posted by (al)pine
users.

Cheers,

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/

In <slrnffg8fj.7ko.pjr@pjr.gotdns.org>, Peter J Ross wrote:

> Unicode would be preferable, and one day perhaps all these legacy
> character sets will die out and stop causing confusion. Does pine
> support Unicode, e.g. UTF-8?

Pine does. But that doesn't solve this problem. Until we know that
anything added to a message would be expecting to add to a UTF8 single
part, Pine (and other mailers) should behave as Pine does.

> Most of your posts cause no problems at all; only the ones that used a
> "Big-5" character set (in response to a post that included three
> Chinese characters) were messed up.

There was also a UTF8 message with non-ASCII characters I quoted that also
behaved this way.

> Once again, here's an [...]

I'm not quoting that this time because I do want people to be able to more
easily read my response to you.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/

Eduardo Chappa wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Peter J Ross wrote:
>
> I have no problem reading other MIME-encoded posts with slrn.
>
> Well, you have found a case where you have a problem reading a
> MIME-encoded message with slrn. The question is whose fault is it? lack of
> support in slrn? over zealous behavior of Pine? Take your pick.
>
> The problem is that multipart MIME posts are being sent when all that's
> needed is a character-set declaration in the headers of a *single-part*
> post.
>
> Unless there is a news server that adds advertisement to every post
> regardless of charset, then you are right.
>
> In my opinion Pine's behavior is safer in terms of taking care of the
> content of the message, but it might be unnecessary for news. I would
> choose being cautious, though. I admit that I prefer a world where this
> behavior is not necessary, but apparently we can not guarantee that we
> live in such world. In fact, this "feature" (or bug, take your pick) came
> as a response that the world we live in does not behave properly.
>
> I'll add this:
> é
> just to see what happens if a pine user replies to this. It would also
> be interesting to know what users of other newsreaders are seeing in
> the questionable posts, just in case it's really a bug in slrn.
>
> Your test should fail with my message. I have enabled that feature in
> Pine, so my messages get downgraded automatically.

I see from you (and still here in my editor) the same e with the mark
over it that I saw in Peter's orignal send. I don't know what you'll
see when I send *this*, but I'm using the same client he is although his
has different tweaks.


--
Blinky RLU 297263
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project moved to this site August 28th:
http://improve-usenet.org