MIME Attachments Are 20 Years Old Today

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."

Comments

Who is this we?

[vlm]

we now send a trillion every day.

Only if the "we" includes spam scripts. I suspect the true number of human sent mime emails is well under a billion per day.

Re:Who is this we?

[John Hasler]

You underestimate the power of a PHB with a Bcc list.

Re:True except that it's false

[TheRaven64]

Is this some new spam bot trick where you quote the first half of a sentence of the summary and then say the second half in your own words?

Re:a new (?) law of mathematics

[Rayonic]

"He also says a one-penny tax on attachments would make him as rich as Germany"

Just goes to show that the product of multiplying two meaningless numbers is a meaningless number.

So it's kinda like a tax break. He could have taxed everyone 1 penny per attachment but he didn't, so he essentially gave everyone 1 penny per email attachment.

Thus Nathaniel Borenstein has given trillions of dollars to spammers. What a jerk! He should have spent those trillions on more worthy causes.

(The scary thing is that many lawmakers think along these lines. Money not taken = money given, regardless of logistics or practicality.)