At 8:41 AM +0200 6/23/2000, Aumont - Comite Reseaux des Universites wrote:
>I think that MLM should be a good reason to use more and more Mime
>features.
The research we've done shows that ~80% of our users want our
newsletters via e-mail, and about that percentage are actively using
HTML or styled text in e-mail already. This is a huge shift in the
last year, FWIW. This has gone from a future to endemic in about 7
months.
On the other hand, opening up to mime opens you up to problems,
especially with active content (from java, jscript, applets, flash,
whatever), as well as exploding message sizes. The exploding message
size is increasingly a minor issue thanks to 56k modems, DSL and
broadband, but still has to be considered. The active content stuff
still scares the cr@p out of me, especially given the recent virus
issues.
I currently want to get to a point where styled text is acceptable,
and non-active data can be attached (jpegs, gifs, png), managing that
by size of message limits; but at the same time, one also needs to
strip active content from the messages to be safe, and also strip
URLs to active content, since I don't think it matters if the virus
comes on the message, or if you click on a link and download the
virus... And that's the crux. No real tool yet that does that "well"
(which, IMHO, includes in-message documentation of what was
stripped...).
There's going to be a need for a text/plain option as well. For our
big lists, we use separate mailings. We're experimenting with
multipart/alternative, but it's not necessarily ready for prime time
yet on a wide scale (or as wide a scale as we need); it works fine on
the intranet level where you have a little more control of which
mailers are used.
Active content's a real doozy issue. It's one reason why I've decided
against doing any Flash on any of my web sites -- because even though
nobody's done a Flash virus, since that's really a program executed
on the client site, there's still risk there. So I'm keeping it
simple to avoid the risks...
--
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"
