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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."

30 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Who is this we? by vlm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    1. Re:Who is this we? by dukeblue219 · · Score: 2

      Yeah, I doubt there's 200 email attachments being sent for every human being on the planet every day. Or maybe my spam filter is a lot better than I thought....

      --
      -Ted http://www.freemathhelp.com/
    2. Re:Who is this we? by John+Hasler · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

      --
      Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
    3. 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
    4. 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.

    5. Re:Who is this we? by grcumb · · Score: 4, Funny

      The article says "I did some checking up, and thereâ(TM)s an estimate that MIME is used a trillion times every day"

      A trillion MIMEs? I'm speechless.
      *runs away without moving*

      --
      Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
    6. Re:Who is this we? by jrumney · · Score: 2

      Attachments are multipart/related, HTML email is multipart/alternative.

      If you're going to argue on technical details, at least get them right. Emails with attachments are almost always multipart/mixed. The attachments themselves can be any mime type.

      Multipart/related is a seldom used extension to mime, intended to deal with situations where different parts refer to the same object, such as Macintosh data and resource forks, digital signatures for attached files, etc.

  2. Larry Wall on MIME by Baldrson · · Score: 4, Funny

    Gad, I hate MIME.
    Larry Wall, 13 Sep 1995

    --
    Seastead this.
  3. Another interesting interview. by olsmeister · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  4. 20 years, eh? No more excuses by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

    For no option for MIME-formatted mailing list digests!

    It's so silly that I usually have to subscribe to instant mails and write a procmail filter for lists I only read once in a while.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  5. 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!

    1. Re:uuencode FTW! by msobkow · · Score: 3, Funny

      Silly me.

      I used to just set up an FTP account and email the receiver the account name and address of the server so they could download it themselves.

      Passwords? What passwords? We were INVULNERABLE! Who in their right mind would bother downloading a student's project, and if they did, WTF would they do with it?

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    2. Re:uuencode FTW! by demonlapin · · Score: 2

      Heh, I remember using a system one summer that didn't have anything for transferring files from it to my home computer - no kermit, sz/rz, xmodem, anything like that. I would uuencode to tty, save the buffer from my terminal program, and uudecode on the PC. God, that was painful.

    3. Re:uuencode FTW! by sootman · · Score: 4, Funny

      Nice, it's not often I get to bust out this old gem:

      User: What do I do with this attachment?
      Admin: You uudecode it.
      User: I I I decode it?

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  6. a new (?) law of mathematics by fche · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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.

    1. Re:a new (?) law of mathematics by Rayonic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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.)

      --
      [PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
    2. Re:a new (?) law of mathematics by JamesP · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hence the old joke

      Don't run after a bus, run after a taxi, you will save a lot more money

      --
      how long until /. fixes commenting on Chrome?
  7. Anyone remember before Mime? by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 3

    Does anyone remember using uuencode and uudecode under Minuet for DOS? I used to use that in the late 1990s on my Tandy 1000 TL. Minuet couldn't read Base64 Mime Attachments.

  8. A 1-penny tax? by guttentag · · Score: 2

    A 1-penny tax (assuming it was paid) would not make him as rich as Germany. It would make the U.S. as rich as... well... the U.S. before the second Bush administration. And still have money left over to rescue the U.S. Postal Service.

    For Nathaniel Borenstein to get rich off this, it would have to be a 1-penny licensing fee.

    1. Re:A 1-penny tax? by fche · · Score: 2

      A few more years of -5billion net income, and we'll see about that.

  9. 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?

  10. Re:True except that it's false by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  11. Marcel Marcaux invented MIME, everyone knows that. by drwho · · Score: 3, Funny

    Or maybe he just popularized it? I don't know. But I get annoyed with these clowns attached to my e-mail messages.

  12. 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)

  13. 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.

    2. Re:MIME is awesome but awful by rdebath · · Score: 2

      Tell me about it, when I first came across MIME itself it was a real WTF moment!

      I hated quoted printable on sight. HTML(SGML) entities are blissful in comparison (Though I think my favourite idea at the time was the 8bit T.61 character set) . Base64 was good, but hardly unique, XXEncode had been using a similar character encoding for a while.

      But this was small change to the (IMO) real nasty, instead of just having the old RFC822 messages as a pure carrier they were trying to merge it into the standard. To tie it to RFC822 messages and, I've now realised, make it look like a smaller change. Of course the only part that highlighted was the 'MIME-Version' header which was an improvement on hunting the message for a 'xxbegin' header.

      I would have left just a 'Content-Encapsulation' header (Like Content-Encoding but I've just renamed it 'cause it's a lot simpler) in the SMTP headers and put everything else in the body of the message, All this header would tell you is how to unwrap the body into a collection of parts; things like "SMTP", "base64", attached-base64-files, eightbit-metafile, etc etc. Just one token to describe the archive you'd have to look inside for the metadata attached to each file (including checksums of course).

      They never did seem to realise that the separation of the container and the data contained INCLUDING it's metadata was actually important, so we have the current mess.

      You know most people on usenet never actually switched to MIME, they used uuencode until it was replaced by 'yenc' (and that's another story)

      [[ Button pushed, venting complete! ]]

  14. 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...

  15. How about a one-penny tax... by TeknoHog · · Score: 2

    on sending pure text as a Word doc attachment?

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    1. Re:How about a one-penny tax... by Dark$ide · · Score: 2

      on sending pure text as a Word doc attachment?

      Should be a one dollar tax on that.

      Worse is sending screen shots as word documents rather than a simple jpeg attachment. Anyone doing that should be sent to Gitmo.

      --

      Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.