MIME 1.0

ravi gadfly at home.com
Wed Nov 7 07:15:18 PST 2001


Matt Cramer wrote:

>


> Seriously though, contained in my tirade against MIME was a real answer to
> Doug's question. MIME just isn't that particularly useful in the big
> scheme of things, and improving it would just increase the amount of inane
> things that are already done via email, e.g. the spreading of viruses and
> worms. SMTP (the internet mail transfer protocol) is a very bad way to
> transfer files. It pushes them to the target, who may not desire the file
> or be prepared to accept it (surely all of us who once had 33.6 modems
> cursed our relatives when they decided to email us 5 megs of pictures
> which took forever to download). SMTP was designed with certain things in
> mind, like guaranteed delivery, which is at odds with efficient transfer
> of data from a bandwidth perspective. Geek time is better spent improving
> the user interface to more efficient transfer mechanisms, like http[s],
> [s]ftp, and scp (secure copying via ssh protocol).
>

matt, i would agree with all you say in principle, but i believe that if the success of the internet demonstrates one thing it is that simple immediate solutions are often better than elegant, far-thinking ones, (TCP/IP and OSI - as we move into bandwidth reservation, session control and the more sophisticated needs of a network, OSI starts looking better on paper, to give one example), that would take long to implement and adopt. email file transfer is a problem not because of SMTP (HTTP or FTP or SCP are built on TCP which provides the same guaranteed delivery mechanism at the transport layer), but because people mail out large files to each other. that said, it is still easier to drag and drop a file to your mail and send it as an attachment, than to sign up for some web space somewhere, upload the file there and then email out pointers. as for SCP or secure FTP etc, they are even more cumbersome from an end user perspective. as these technologies mature and provide easier user interfaces (and what i argue here is already a 1 year old view, so my point might be outdated, i admit) and further work provides secure means to access distributed data using universal URI schemes and such, they will be adopted. in the meantime MIME serve[sd] a valuable purpose.

--ravi

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- man is said to be a rational animal. i do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. more often i have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the 2nd degree. -- alasdair macintyre.



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