I'm gradually moving towards the minimalist school of thought on
RFCs and such, I think. I'd be inclined to trim text from the
transition document more than add to it. The transition of most folks
will probably be very short.
Other folks in my building had gotten and were using MIME-based mail
readers based on Metamail before I even had a chance to mention MIME
to them. Articles today in OPEN SYSTEMS TODAY, COMMUNICATIONS WEEK,
and NETWORK WORLD all talked about various commercial MIME products
and about how rapidly MIME is being deployed everywhere.
The simple reality is that MIME is currently freely available for a
very large number of platforms (not JUST the UNIX-based systems, also
things like DOS and MS-Windows and the Mac and DEC VMS -- and even
some older systems that MRC likes), without any need for enhanced SMTP
at all. Most freely distributable email MUAs are going to move to
full MIME compliance in their next release if they aren't already
fully MIME. MIME MUAs are also already commercially available (from
Z-code and other vendors, see the MIME FAQ in USENET's comp.mail.mime)
for a large number of platforms (e.g. most workstations, MSDOS, OS/2,
MS-Windows).
Folks I regularly communicate with in Europe are now mostly sending
me MIME multilingual email, which is working quite well. The European
MIME mail I get seems mostly to be using ISO-8859-1 encoded in BASE64
which is not at all surprising.
As near as I can tell, only selected dinosaur systems that lurk
mainly inside the US DoD won't be MIME-capable soon. The vast
majority of systems on the net (including UUCPnet) can implement MIME
easily today.
The transition appears likely to be short. Let's make/keep the
transition document short and simple as well and not go into great
detail about pathological cases.
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil