Re: McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>]

Timothy C. May says:
> For example, I could spend some number of hours switching from my
> current mail progam (elm) to some other editor which perhaps
> better-supported the MIME messages seen here. But if all I got for
> several hours of using, learning, and becoming comfortable with, say,
> "pine," was the ability to see an _italicized_ word, or a word in
> Cyrillic, then I would consider this a poor ROI.

You misunderstand the purpose of MIME. It is a way of standardizing
the encapsulation of non-ascii information and references inside of an
RFC-822 mail message. It allows you to do things like get cyrillic or
what have you, but more importantly, it allows things like recursive
encapsulation of your messages inside encrypting transformations, the
transmission of attachments allong with documents, mailing HTML,
embedding external references in mail (i.e. "Click here to get a copy
of my latest program) and dozens of other significant things. MIME and
HTML are complementary to each other -- HTTP is one way of
transporting HTML, but with MIME you can see a Web page, cut it out,
paste it into your MIME aware gee-whiz mailer, and send it to someone
who could then treat it just like he was looking at the Web, provided
he, too, had a good enough MIME capable reader. You could send out
your latest document, in parallel, in postscript and in Word format
(or whatever) so that lots of people could read it and prepend an
explanatory document describing what the contents were -- some MIME
readers will then display the attachment as an icon that you could
then drag and drop into an appropriate viewer or printer.

MIME is a general infrastructural mechanism for this and more. Its a
bit of a toy right now on mailing lists because too many people lack
MIME capable readers, but in environments where MIME is universally
used it has already taken over and is a fundamental part of the way
people do business. Once you've seen a secretary who barely
understands anything drag a spreadsheet into a mail message and send
it to someone on another continent who, equally ignorantly, just
double-clicks on it and then has the spreadsheet program launch, you
will understand what the point of MIME is.

Without a MIME capable reader you can't do any of these things, of
course. Even with one, you might not initially see any benefits
because you might be using a mediocre reader or you might not have any
correspondants who do snazzy things. However, MIME is rapidly being
deployed and is going to be universal within a couple of years. Its
not just a silly way to sign your name with a GIF.

> Like it or not, we are now in a mostly-ASCII Net environment.

We are in a mostly graphical net environment. Its been seven years
since I used a machine (for more than a few minutes) that didn't have
a bitmapped display. The Macintosh you are sitting in front of right
now knows nothing about ASCII -- its a bitmapped display, not a
character generator based display, and it can show whatever font you
like.

What you are actually saying is that you use a primitive interface
into your network service provider rather than, say, SLIP or PPP, and
that because of this you are restricted to dumb-terminal type
operations on a computer that is far more capable than that.

Were I you, I'd get PPP account from Netcom and a POP based mailer to
handle your mail reading directly on your Mac. You will no longer have
to bitch about downloading your mail to the mac to decrypt it -- you
will be able to just drag and drop mail into PGP with the right
tools. You won't have to worry about MIME with the right package, either.

> The "Display Postscript" standard was an attempt to bootstrap the
> world to a new standard for document display, and it failed.

Display postscript was for windowing systems. It had nothing to do
with document displays per se. I can view postscript just as easily
here on my workstation as ASCII. Display postscript was not a document
viewer technology but a way of building things like NeXTStep, which
did indeed fail -- but thats because X won, and X is in wide use.

Perry