Re: [ietf-smtp] [Proposal] confusing parts of the mail system, was 250-MARKDOWN

[Gene Hightower <[e-mail]>]

On 09/01/2019 06.35, John Levine wrote:

> My mail server doesn't support or understand any media types at all.
> MIME and media types are all handled in the MUA.

I agree, except for BINARYMIME: the one MIME type advertised in the
greeting stage of ESMTP.

Does your MTA use a mail store based on mbox files?  Many still do;
that means no BINARYMIME.  Do you only support DATA for sending mail
bodies (no BDAT); that also means no BINARYMIME.

Can you imagine the bandwidth saved (and carbon emissions, storage,
etc.) if we had universal support for BINARYMIME?  No more encoding
photos and videos as base64 text.

As for text/markdown as a MIME type: it would be nice to have
something lighter than HTML for simple formatted text.  But we already
have text/enriched defined in RFC 1896 and that seems to have zero
adoption.

HTML as a “standard” is a dog's dinner.