Folks,
One of the sources of amusement for some folks is to cast aspersions upon
the community's rate of adoption of Mime. Since the adoption hasn't been
as explosive as many had hoped for, I think it might be worth a brief
thread discussing status. I recently had to give a presentation on the
matter and found Erik Huizer's recent survey (3 days before my
presentation...) quite helpful.
On the matter of slowness. We have seen examples of explosive adoption on
the Internet. Usually, they occur when folks mostly use free software.
It's easy to get. In the case of SNMP, the "pull" from the target user
market was massively strong, AND the initial target population was
relatively small (sysops, rather than end-users) AND it was relatively
technical. Hence, they could quickly start using rough code.
The email market, of course, is quite different. So, there was some early
freely-available code and a set of users who adopted it. But the Internet
email community is much, much larger than the Internet tcp/ip community and
most of its members use commercial, non-Internet software, often of the LAN
workgroup variety. Even within the core Internet community, commercial
email packages have become common.
This means that Mime adoption is contingent upon vendor incorporation.
Since this isn't a new market, but rather an enhancement to an existing
market, the Mime incorporation must be fit into existing, very-full product
planning. My guess is that there also was some hesitation by vendors; it
was not instantly obvious to all vendors that Mime was the right thing to
adopt, given 10 years of focus on X.400. All of this slows things down.
So we are a few years down the pike and wonder how things are going. It's
clear that we can't say something simple, like "everyone is using Mime."
But perhaps we can.
First, Erik's quick survey uncovered perhaps 10 different end-user products
and a gateway product in use. From the presentation I did the following
week, folks in the audience cited several more different sources.
I believe the following is fair to say: There is substantial availability
of Mime support today. Overall, every commercial email product -- end user
AND gateway -- is either shipping Mime support or has it in their product
development cycle. In all likelihood, almost all products will have
shipped a version by the end of 95.
Comments?
d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg Consulting Phone: +1 408 246 8253
675 Spruce Dr. Fax: +1 408 249 6205
Sunnyvale, CA 94086 Email:
dcrocker(_at_)mordor(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu