One of the areas where MIME still, ten years after its
introduction, often fails is when people copy e-mail
messages into the bodies of new e-mail addresses. Quite
often, you see text encoded according to the e-mail heading
rules for non-ASCII characters in the bodies of such
messages.
is that a failure of MIME or a failure to completely implement MIME?
how can the MIME spec (or any spec) solve a problem if implementors
pick and choose which parts they are going to implement?
The conclusion of what I have written above is that there
will maybe be a need to extend the existing e-mail
standards, so that the e-mail address of especially From
and Sender fields can be specified in a dual format, with
both the national and the international (ASCII) name
specified at the same time.
not clear. one sure way to cause problems is to provide two different
ways to specify the same thing, when those two things have any
possibility of diverging.