"Wolf" wrote in message
...
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.

Who is "he"?

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?

There are free newsreaders that decode yEnc.

--
Travis in Shoreline Washington