> > there's more than one kind of effectiveness. effectiveness at getting > > a technology deployed is quite different from effectiveness of that > > technology (once deployed) at supporting reliable operation for a > > variety of applications. > > keith - may i refer you to don eastlake's earlier reply? viz., the existing > system is quite effective because products that don't play by the concensus > rules have a much harder time thriving or even surviving.
sometimes this works. as a generalization, it doesn't hold up. > > Just to pick a small example: MIME has been out for nearly 10 years and > > I'm still receiving, on a daily basis, MIME attachments that are > > unreadable because they lack proper content-type labelling. > > That's not what I would call "effective". > > then ignore it or fix it. obviously, the pain isn't at the point where it > bothers you... for myself, the program that handles my incoming mail dumps > MIME-bad stuff into an audit file and then ignores it. if it was > "important", then whoever sent it can get on the phone... in doing this for > the last 10 years, i've yet to suffer a mishap because of this... that kind of solution is easy for you or me. unfortunately, it doesn't scale to a user base of 100s of millions of people that's trying to use email to ship around attachments and wondering why they don't work. the reason I don't filter such stuff is because I want to understand the kinds of problems other folks are having. Keith
