Just to pick a small example: MIME has been out for nearly 10 years and
I'm still receiving, on a daily basis, MIME attachments that are
unreadable because they lack proper content-type labelling.
There is a difference between effective and perfect.
and there's a difference between requirements analysis and exaggeration.
there's also a difference betweeen 90% (which is where I'd put the
reliability of internet email, averaged over all users *) and 99.9% or
99.99%. of course, even 99.99% is a long way from 'perfect', but we
rarely need for things to perfect. but for many purposes 90% isn't
good enough.
Keith
* if you think this figure is too low, consider that the vast majority of
email users are handled by a small number of email providers, not all of
which have exemplary service records.