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MIME Attachments Are 20 Years Old Today

Posted by Soulskill on from the trapped-in-a-box dept.

judgecorp writes "MIME email attachments have been around for 20 years, and we now send a trillion every day. The mountains of emails in corporate archives now contain vital information, says MIME inventor Nathaniel Borenstein, which can be mined to expose conspiracies and make businesses more efficient. He also says a one-penny tax on attachments would make him as rich as Germany — if it weren't for the fact that such a charge would have killed MIME."

5 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Another interesting interview. by olsmeister · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here is another interesting interview with Ned Borenstein I read last week.

  2. Re:Who is this we? by Lennie · · Score: 3, Informative

    Most of the mail that is sent has at least 1 mime type, like text/html and a lot of times it also has a text/plain

    These too are "attachments", the user interface might not show it that way but technically they are the same as any other attachment.

    --
    New things are always on the horizon
  3. Re:20 years, eh? No more excuses by xaxa · · Score: 3, Informative

    A MIME-formatted mailing list digest would be a file encapsulating many emails, in whatever format those emails were sent in.

    Think of "saving" many emails from your email program, then attaching them to a new message, and sending that to someone.

    Something like this: http://pastebin.com/uJ6K6ias (KMail shows it correctly, GMail doesn't, I don't know what the problem is)

  4. Re:Marcel Marcaux invented MIME, everyone knows th by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    *sigh* http://lmgtfy.com/?q=marcel+marceau

    Also,
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mime

    Yeah, I know it was a joke, but still...

  5. Re:Who is this we? by Karlt1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The author didn't say that a trillion emails were sent everyday, he said MIME was used a trillion times everyday. MIME is also used as part of http.