Dave,
I haven't seen Erik's survey, and I don't know what areas it covers. Do
you have a reference?
There are certainly more than one gateway product in use; There are even
companies that have specialized in writing MIME gateways for various
commercial mail packages like quickmail, msmail and ccmail.
I think people have been faster to adopt MIME outside of the US, since we
have a much worse situation with national characters, and MIME
applications has proven successful in solving those problems.
Secondly, I think that the large body of MIME users will be found outside
the universities, since many universities already have a large investment
[in knowledge] in older mail systems and therefore are more reluctant to
change. But among the new users, the companies and governmental
institutions that are being connected now, MIME is probably much more
common.
The consumer market is also a driving force for the adoption of MIME. One
sign of that is that the Stockholm Interop '94 launched a MIME test of
various commercial clients and gateways. Also, when the former Swedish
prime minister got his email address this spring, there were articles in
the popular press about strange representation of national characters in
email from the prime minister. (He was not using MIME at that time.)
Your estimate of the time frame for vendors to start shipping MIME
products is probably accurate. I know that many people outside the US are
reluctant to buy mail applications that are not MIME aware, and mail that
is sent with national characters with no MIME encapsulation are, for most
newbies, unreadable.
-Rickard
Rickard Schoultz <schoultz(_at_)sunet(_dot_)se>
SUNET/NORDUnet/Ebone Operations Center
KTH, S-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
Phone: +46-8-7908365 Fax: +46-8-241179