wdc> == Bill Cattey <wdc(_at_)athena(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu>
wdc> There is a risk that by adding MIME compatibility that our current
wdc> mail infra-structure will suddenly become overloaded with larger
wdc> multi-media mail and more messages from many people trying it out.
wdc> (For example, people may discover how easy it is to send
wdc> multi-megabyte GIF files through post office servers used to only
wdc> seeing that much stuff in a whole day.)
I think the issue here is not MIME per se but the fact that it
encourages large messages. I would be inclined to argue that if large
messages are the problem, size, not MIMEness, should be the filter
criterion.
After all, MIMEifying this message would probably result in (at most)
about a 150% size increase (assume a multipart/alternative with richtext
and us-ascii). No problem. If I included video of myself talking to
you, well, that's different ;-)
Perhaps the message/external-body could be used as a way to keep the
load off the athena-po servers? After all, "afs" is a valid type...
though incoming MIME messages may need to be translated from whatever
they came as into message/external-body constructs. (If I mailed you
15M of video, base64 encoded, your mailer would have to turn that into a
15M file on /afs/athena.mit.edu/mime-enclosures/message-id or something,
but at least your RMAIL process wouldn't try to eat it!)
--Chris