Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 21-Jan-93 Re: MIME to Draft Standard
Erik M. van der Poel(_at_)poe (5592)
Anyway, since it is clearly impossible for people in such an enclave
to send RFC 1341 conformant messages to "the Internet", since it is
just too impractical to alter the large number of gateways that
translate from that enclave to the Internet, MIME should be changed to
put the Content-Type, Content-Transfer-Encoding, etc headers in the
"body" itself, i.e. not in the "RFC 822 headers".
[....]
There are several solutions that I think we should consider:
1. The way the "Andrew" implementation used to do it. (Nathaniel, would
you care to describe this?)
Well, the answer to this question also gives my answer to why I think
this isn't a major problem....
The answer for Andrew was that it used (indeed, invented) the
"Content-type" header field. A few gateways didn't pass it through, but
most of them got changed eventually. Most such gateways seem to have a
list of headers they pass, and adding new ones like
content-transfer-encoding is not generally a major hassle. So the truth
is, Andrew didn't have any magical solution for this, it worked much
like MIME works, and it was not a major problem.... -- Nathaniel