FreeLists / arachne / [arachne] Re: Contributing (or not, as the case may be)

["Samuel W. Heywood" <sheywood@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 17:02:40 -0400, L.D. Best wrote:

> Sam H,

> You've made some invalid assumptions.

> The huge majority of company employees have no problem with RTF and/or
> the windows.dat file attachment; most won't even notice the attachment
> is there.

I don't know whether that is true, but if it is true, so what?  The
majority has to learn how to adapt and to get along with others.
In this case it isn't as though the others were asking the majority
to bend over backwards and go out of its way to make special
concessions and allowances for them.

> The same holds true for the people outside the company with whom
> correspondence is exchanged.

This is not true for the people outside of the company.  Many of the
companies and the customers with whom the company exchanges email
correspondence do not use Micro$oft Outlook and they don't like the
useless "wimmail.dat" attachments and the base64 encoded text
attachments.

If it were an acceptable and normal practice for companies to send
emails like Joe's, then I would be seeing a lot of emails like his
being sent to me by the various companies I do business with.  So
far I have never seen any emails like Joe's being sent to me from the
computers belonging to any other company.

> They are using Windows and Windows handles things just fine ... there is
> no "trash" as far as the company and its clients are concerned.  No PITA
> at all.

How ignorant of them!  Most window$ dummies don't even know how to look
at their email messages with a text viewer to see all the trash.  The
message viewer that comes with Outlook doesn't even display the stingers
on the tail end of the attachment names.  Also, Outlook is so poorly
designed that it doesn't even have a feature to prevent the launching of
the stinger if you click on the attachment ikon.  With Outlook your
computer can get infected simply as a result of opening an email.  The
notorious perversities of Outlook are widely known to most computer users.
I don't know why anyone would want to have a program like that installed
on his computer.  Another very serious problem with Outlook is that it
is very difficult to remove from one's computer.

> Even if, like I, people on the receiving end opt out of the RTF and
> prefer e-mail to show up in plain text whenever possible, that little
> dat file is no more than a tiny batch of letters up in a corner of the
> e-mail client screen.

It is a waste of bandwidth and a waste of disk space.  A waste is a
terrible thing to mind.  And what about the annoying base64 text
attachments?  It is a real PITA to reply to messages like that.

> All that said, I think it shows your argument and belief are invalid.

> HOWEVER, I would certainly bring the problem to the attention of those
> responsible for security and the MIS folks ... because it shows there is
> a flaw in the server setup, and flaws like that mean the potential of
> exploitation from outside sources and/or loss of data being exchanged.
> However, it's not a thing to be pushy about unless the person pushing
> knows enough to find the glitch and fix the glitch PERSONALLY with no
> 'down time' to the servers.  IOW, Joe would be totally insane to get
> pushy and rag on anyone about the problem because Joe can't fix it
> himself and Joe wants to keep his job.

Why would he want to keep a job with a company that insists on
misconfiguring its mail servers in such a way to give his email
correspondents such an unfavorable impression of him?  Without Joe's
explanation about why his emails fail to meet acceptable standards,
most people would think that the problem is Joe's fault and not the
fault of the company he works for.  He has to blame the company in
order to explain why his emails are so screwed up.

Sam
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