I am a bit concerned about adoption of MIME by the various online
services. Most of these services have proprietary email systems which
are not very internet-friendly. John Myers and I have been receiving
many "bug reports" about mpack due to systems that place internet
headers at the end of the message. As far as I know, major vendors
like AOL don't have MIME support planned in the near future. The only
approach to this problem I've come up with is getting as many users of
these services as possible to ask for MIME support.
The other area of concern is netnews. A quick glance at the binaries
groups will show that MIME is not widely used (and when used, it is
always mis-used with X-uue or x-uuencode CTEs). I tried posting a true
MIME message recently, and found that while most newsreaders have MIME
support, it defaults turned off and requires separate installation of
metamail, which many sysadmins simply haven't done. Perhaps, in order
to get more people on the bandwagon, we need a small library which
parses MIME and saves parts to files if metamail isn't available.
- Chris