Gerry D (Canada) wrote:
I don't think the poster is broken, but rather the recipient. yEnc has been around for so
many years that even slow MS should have been able to include it in a new version of OE.
If they choose not to, they are missing the boat. Are they self-serving or serving their
users? Pssst, I know the answer to that question...

Yeah, well, MS does conform to applicable international\web standards:
OE is built to receive and decode both MIME and uuencode (IIRC, it uses
MIME to send.) It so happens that newsreaders and e-mail clients on all
other platforms also conform to these standards. That's why you can read
an e-mail sent from somebody using a Mac or running on Linux, for
example. While there are lots of reasons to despise MS, this isn't one
of them.

YEnc is proprietary. MS can't simply include it in OE - they have to
make a deal with its owner, who appears to be a 1st class prat. Among
other things he has "improved" it several times in the worst way
possible: newer versions aren't backward compatible with older ones,
and/or he hasn't shared sufficient detail with the writers of
newsreaders. That's why T'bird, for example, will read some yEnc posts,
but not others. I've never bothered looking at the headers to figure out
what the difference/reason is. He's also refused to co-operate with the
international body that regulates web standards such as packet formats,
MIME, etc, without which the web wouldn't work at all. Last time I
looked at his website, he whinged about those nasty standards people who
expected him to pay out of his own pocket for the submissions etc needed
for that body to even consider adopting yEnc as another encoding
standard. IOW, he's the reason it's not a standard, not the fact that
the majority of plain ordinary computer users don't use it.

If you want the widest possible audience for his or her posts, don't use
yEnc. MIME or uuencode works with _all_ newsreaders. Most people
nowadays buy a computer as an appliance - a machine that's ready to go,
doing all the things they want it to do. Why should they get additional
software to read a post in a non-standard format?

--
Wolf
'Just because it's true doesn't mean it's the right answer.'