Before anyone takes offense, let me clarify that I do indeed know this 
is a private server, maintained and made available to me for free. If 
the following sounds harsh, it's nothing personal, it's just a pet peeve 
of mine. But hopefully nobody will even think to take anything 
personally. The use of the word "you" here doesn't mean you personally, 
and terms like "broken" are not to be interpreted pejoratively.

Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
>>*If* the web site is going to send things out as uuencoded, it's quite
>>important not to lie about that and hence not to put
>>   content-type: text/plain
>>in the headers, because it's obviously not plain text.
> 
> But that is what is inside and the header is correct! 

Um, no. What's inside is definitely something like a bitmap, and not 
something that could be (say) translated to French. Hence, it's not 
"plain text" as such, but rather something encoded to look like plain 
text. By adding a content-type, you've specifically instructed 
newsreaders to show to the viewer exactly what's in the message, using 
the glyphs related to the character set. In other words, by saying

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

you're telling the newsreader "this is a chunk of text encoded as 
ISO-8859-1, so you should look up each byte of the message, index into 
the appropriate font table, and draw the image of that character on the 
screen to display it.

You're definitely not saying "look at the text, try to guess whether the 
sender is lying about what's really there, try to reverse engineer the 
content encoding, then try to guess based on the content what kind of 
file it actually is, and if it comes up as a bitmap, decompress the 
bitmap and draw individual pixels on the screen in the right colors." 
That's definitely not "text". :-)

Were this stored in a database, I would not want to include the body of 
this message in full-text searches, for example.

 > Headers never apply
> to attachments, thus it is irrelevant what is in the header.

That's the problem. It's not an "attachment." It's a piece of text. 
That's what your headers say.

Indeed, in this context, talking about "attachment" is bogus, since MIME 
doesn't say anything about "attachments". You have content types and 
content transfer encodings. There's no such concept as an "attachment" 
in standard internet email.

> Even if not, the robustness principle dictates that newsreaders have to
> display content regardless of the format they assume if the content is
> something they are able to decode.  And the newsreaders I have for testing
> do this without problems.

Correct. However, if you say "Hey, this is plain text" and that's what 
the newsreader shows, I'd say your newsreader is doing the Right Thing. 
Just like if you said "Hey, this is japanese" and your newsreader tried 
displaying japanese characters instead of the english you typed, because 
it couldn't decode it and guess it's english.

Trying to compensate for people who say "Hey, this is an image" and then 
attaching an .exe is where you get many of your viruses.

In other words, "two wrongs don't make a right."  Just because you have 
many newsreaders that compensate for brokenness doesn't mean it isn't 
broken, and the newsreaders that don't compensate for your broken posts 
aren't broken either.

That said, I appriciate it's a private server made available to me for 
free, so I'm not upset or anything. Just explaining what the problem is. :-)

> Thus, if you cannot view the message it simply implies your newsreader does
> not support this format.

That's incorrect. Had it been encoded as an "attachment", it would work. 
Had it been encoded as "I don't know what this is" it would work.

I am using 1.6 mozilla. Since I just upgraded maybe a month ago, I don't 
think that's the problem. If you post a uuencoded file inside a 
mime-complient header that claims it's not uuencoded, then mozilla does 
(and always did, and *should*) show it as plain text, just how the 
sender said.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA USA (PST)
   I am in geosynchronous orbit, supported by
   a quantum photon exchange drive....

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