Problems with MIME (was: [Link Posting] Deprecating scp/tmp)

[Eli the Bearded]

(Added news.software.readers)

One part of this problem are newsreaders that are mail programs in
disguise, like Claws Mail. They use non-identity Transfer-Encodings
by default (likely because the original SMTP was not 8-bit clean).
At least for Claws Mail this can be configured, but most users don't
do it.

All of that is minor compared to not having the correct headers to begin

and with bugs.

Another part of the problem is that many people still use broken
implementations that are decades old. In the meantime some newsreaders,
that are still maintained, have learned MIME to a level that "works in
most cases" for western languages. An examples is OpenXP (Version 5).

This is indeed true. It's a symptom of Usenet / netnews being old and
not shiny.

But at least in the german hierarchy the trn users are part of
the problem (it does NOT work with the way they use trn).

With stock trn4 there are bugs, but they _can_ be carefully worked
around. Use -j to not squash octets 128 to 190, and ensure that the
correct headers are used in posts, eg by changing defaults in NEWSHEADER
setting.

With the fork at https://github.com/acli/trn the reader part of the
software is fixed to handle "charset" on Content-Type: and -j isn't
needed anymore. That's good start. The posting side still doesn't have
enough error checks, but changing defaults in NEWSHEADER is a good
start.

In Germany some news servers now reject articles (on injection) when
they contain 8-bit characters in the header. Hopefully this will push
things further into the right direction.

Presumably you mean raw 8-bit, not MIME-encoded words like your own
"=?ISO-8859-1?Q?B=E4uerle?=".

Elijah
------
is using the acli trn now

[Michael Bäuerle]

Post by Eli the Bearded

One part of this problem are newsreaders that are mail programs in
disguise, like Claws Mail. They use non-identity Transfer-Encodings
by default (likely because the original SMTP was not 8-bit clean).
At least for Claws Mail this can be configured, but most users don't
do it.

All of that is minor compared to not having the correct headers to begin

and with bugs.

And the real sad part is, that all the Smartphone newsreaders with new
MIME implementations are broken *again*. NewsTap for iOS is likely the
one with the least number of bugs.

Post by Eli the Bearded

Another part of the problem is that many people still use broken
implementations that are decades old. In the meantime some newsreaders,
that are still maintained, have learned MIME to a level that "works in
most cases" for western languages. An examples is OpenXP (Version 5).

This is indeed true. It's a symptom of Usenet / netnews being old and
not shiny.

But at least in the german hierarchy the trn users are part of
the problem (it does NOT work with the way they use trn).

With stock trn4 there are bugs, but they _can_ be carefully worked
around. Use -j to not squash octets 128 to 190, and ensure that the
correct headers are used in posts, eg by changing defaults in NEWSHEADER
setting.
With the fork at https://github.com/acli/trn the reader part of the
software is fixed to handle "charset" on Content-Type: and -j isn't
needed anymore. That's good start. The posting side still doesn't have
enough error checks, but changing defaults in NEWSHEADER is a good
start.

Nice to hear that somebody tries to update trn for better MIME support.
Looks like there are many people that still prefer trn over slrn and tin
(both with good MIME support).

Post by Eli the Bearded

In Germany some news servers now reject articles (on injection) when
they contain 8-bit characters in the header. Hopefully this will push
things further into the right direction.

Presumably you mean raw 8-bit, not MIME-encoded words like your own
"=?ISO-8859-1?Q?B=E4uerle?=".

Exactly. E.g. Forté Agent has MIME checkboxes in the setup, that must be
enabled. Because Forté Agent itself always displays its own articles
correctly, some users don't notice that they use a wrong configuration.