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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."

4 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. uuencode FTW! by jtownatpunk.net · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was trying to remember how I emailed binaries back in the day then I remembered piping uuencode into mail and addresses with bangs and hoping some grouchy admin along the UUCP trail didn't bitch about the traffic. Get off my lawn!

  2. Can we stop sucking Steve Jobs' dick? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Half of the first page is about how great and amazing Steve Jobs was, despite the fact that he wanted to cock up everything. Can journalists really not write an article about him without sucking up to the guy, even when it's about something he did (or tried to do) WRONG?

  3. MIME is awesome but awful by dskoll · · Score: 4, Interesting

    MIME is quite amazing, but some of the RFCs such as RFC 2231 are a real WTF. I took over maintainership of the MIME::tools Perl module and felt murderous sentiments towards the authors of that RFC...

    1. Re:MIME is awesome but awful by dskoll · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What's bad about it is coming up with sane ways to deal with malformed parameter values while minimizing security risks. There are many ways to abuse that spec (for example) to specify something that Outlook sees as "filename.exe" while your security scanner sees "innoccuous.txt", depending on how the malformed parameter is interpreted.

      Handling well-formed MIME is easy. Dealing safely with malformed MIME is a nightmare. And unfortunately, because of piles of bad software, you can't be pedantic and simply reject malformed MIME; end-users will riot.