On Wed, Apr 08, 2020 at 01:17:12PM +0100, Sam Kuper wrote: > On Tue, Apr 07, 2020 at 09:23:34PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > > On Sun, Apr 05, 2020 at 12:09:55AM +0100, Sam Kuper wrote: > > Sorry, but this is an archaic way of looking at the problem. People > > have been doing this for decades now, has become the norm, common > > practice, and really it is therefore WE who are being inconsiderate by > > not accepting de facto standards that have been widely adopted for a > > very long time. > > I disagree. You have made a "roads were built for cars" argument*: it > assumes that today's "de facto standard" trumps historical precedent and > considerate behaviour. > > I've nothing against people sending emails with multiple attachments. > But expecting the recipient's MUA to parse multiple attachments into > some kind of combined document is presumptuous, because clearly not > everyone's MUA does this.
There's a HUUUUUGE difference. Roads existed for millenia before cars. By the time e-mail was in widespread use (the mid-90's... just because you may have had it before then does not mean it was wide spread before that), MIME was already a standard, and the vast majority of e-mail clients had support for it. The GUI ones had it built in. So your argument is a straw man. > And even if yours does: should it? As several people in this thread > have pointed out (and as is also illustrated in the "Efail" paper by > Poddebniak et al, linked in my footer), using such an MUA massively > increases your attack surface. Just because the current batch of GUI MUAs does this does not mean yours *needs* to. That would be the beauty of a GUI Mutt--it already has the philosophy of not automatically exposing you to all those same attack vectors. After all, text-based Mutt has exactly the same attack vetctors; it just does not expose you to them by default--you have to take action to expose yourself to them. And honestly, most mailers have the ability to avoid these attack vectors--they just don't by default, because that's what the average person wants. Mutt users typically are not average e-mail users, and know better. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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