MIME Attachments Are 20 Years Old Today 82
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."
Who is this we? (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.
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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....
Re:Who is this we? (Score:4, 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.
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That's not what he said.
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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.
Re:Who is this we? (Score:5, Insightful)
You underestimate the power of a PHB with a Bcc list.
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BCC? If only.
Did you know you can put an unpractically huge number of addresses in the TO: field alone? I love seeing my email address neatly nestled amid 200 others that definitely won't be picked up by spammers, for sure.
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You underestimate the power of a PHB with a Bcc list.
They only use MIME to wrap their true container format: the almighty PowerPoint presentation.
Re:Who is this we? (Score:5, 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.
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The article says "I did some checking up, and thereâ(TM)s an estimate that MIME is used a trillion times every day"
Re:Who is this we? (Score:5, 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*
Larry Wall on MIME (Score:5, Funny)
Larry Wall, 13 Sep 1995
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Yeah, what Larry said.
Although it's kind of cute to get work newsletters where the plain-text part is empty, so my mailer just displays "This message has no content."
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Well, humour aside,I really hate MIME as well - I write a few MIME handling tools (ripMIME, alterMIME and such) and I have to say I just HATE IT.
Would have much rathered we ended up with something more akin to a zip or even tar.gz. Sure Microsoft tried to give us TNEF but that was a disaster for its own reasons.
Another interesting interview. (Score:4, Informative)
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20 years, eh? No more excuses (Score:3)
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.
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The reason why there is none is that plain text converts information better than HTML with embedded images.
Re:20 years, eh? No more excuses (Score:4, 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 [pastebin.com] (KMail shows it correctly, GMail doesn't, I don't know what the problem is)
I remember (Score:1)
I remember the absolute shitstorm on Usenet when Borenstein posted a mime-format message with image/sound of him and others (Mark Crispin?) performing acapella.
uuencode FTW! (Score:5, 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!
Re:uuencode FTW! (Score:4, 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?
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Or post it to any of the many BBS servers that were still all the rage at the time.
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Re:uuencode FTW! (Score:5, 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?
a new (?) law of mathematics (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.
Re:a new (?) law of mathematics (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.)
Re:a new (?) law of mathematics (Score:5, Funny)
Hence the old joke
Don't run after a bus, run after a taxi, you will save a lot more money
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What did you fix exactly? His original quote basically said that except for the direct reference to uuencode.
Anyone remember before Mime? (Score:4)
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.
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But besides that, minuet is an example of how good a program can be even on an inferior os. I was suprised (i tested it after working with os/2, solaris and linux). Minuet did everything i needed. In fact it could do so in a few mb of ram, quite fast and stable. If you would give me the choice between webmail an minuet, i still would prefer minuet....
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Which department do you mean..?
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The department of redundancy department.
A 1-penny tax? (Score:3)
For Nathaniel Borenstein to get rich off this, it would have to be a 1-penny licensing fee.
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A few more years of -5billion net income, and we'll see about that.
Re:True except that it's false (Score:4, Insightful)
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Is there a reason why you didn't bother reading the second half of the sentence before you commented? Are you a member of the Redundant Brigade?
Can we stop sucking Steve Jobs' dick? (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?
Marcel Marcaux invented MIME, everyone knows that. (Score:4, Funny)
Or maybe he just popularized it? I don't know. But I get annoyed with these clowns attached to my e-mail messages.
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*sigh* http://lmgtfy.com/?q=marcel+marceau
Also,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mime
Yeah, I know it was a joke, but still...
MIME is awesome but awful (Score:5, Interesting)
MIME is quite amazing, but some of the RFCs such as RFC 2231 [ietf.org] are a real WTF. I took over maintainership of the MIME::tools Perl module and felt murderous sentiments towards the authors of that RFC...
Re:MIME is awesome but awful (Score:5, 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.
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It could have been much, much worse. If MIME hadn't have come along, we could have all ended up being forced to use X.400, which like all the ISO-OSI networking stuff, horrific. (And which you have to pay a fee and sign an NDA to get the documentation that is the equivalent of an RFC)
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OSI was "hard sums" and you had to learn ASN1 just to read the specs but it did do binary well before SMTP. I don't recall a NDA but it was designed by and for PTT's though compared to the on average low quality of RFC's the quality of the standards where much higher much less ignoring the hard stuff which is endemic in internet based standards (wifi being a good example here)
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Heh... I guess it's all relative. :) Every time I get annoyed at Linux, I think of how nasty it would be to run Windows on my desktop and then I calm down.
Yes, X.400 would've been far, far worse.
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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.
Wait! (Score:1)
Didn't Apple invent and patent MIME attachments (after stealing the idea from Nate)?
What's that? No? Well they claim to have invented and patented everything else they've stolen, so I figured I had at least a 50/50 shot...
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So this kind of thing goes around in all circles. It depends on how tolerant you are of people trying to rewrite computing history as to how much of it you'll put up with. Thi
Thunderbird difficulty (Score:2)
I have a friend who has trouble with my sending them copies of email chains as attachments. That is, they want to see some emails I've got so I MIME attach them to an email saying "Here you go."
Is it really all that tough in Thunderbird to view attachments?
How about a one-penny tax... (Score:3)
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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.
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When your IT admins sends out an email with a word doc attachment (because if it were anything else you wouldn't know what to do with it) that has multiple screen shots in it and lots of words that is called a walk through. It means they are tired of you calling for the same "how to/walk through" every single day. They might post it in a knowledge base and send an email letting you know it's there but then you would have to call and ask them to reset your password for the knowledge base every single day. Th
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Getting rich (Score:2)
MIMEs? Yeah, great... (Score:2)
Try and figure out how to get Explorer to recognize a Dreamweaver template file as a valid HTML document. In my case (Win7) it was a friggin' registry hack.
Y'know, Microsoft, there ARE still designers who use templates out here. For those shitty little sites that don't deserve more than a few hours work to get them live. And no... people don't use Frontpage anymore. We've moved on. Play well with others, guys. Sheesh.