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I agree largely with Keith.
I was mostly disturbed by the things that email is being used for.
We started, years ago, with FTP-by-mail as a weird aberation. UUCP connected
sites rapidly banned this. Ironically, MIME institutionalized it.
A major lack that we have on the Internet is that there is no trivial
and easy way for two individuals to share files. This isn't mail's fault,
but mail has been used to fill to gap, and the result is the disaster that
we are in.
Worse of all has been the MIME-multipart, in my opinion.
(I think that spam would not have remained effective as it apparently
has if so much of it wasn't of the multimedia variety)
While SMTP has lots of problems, I would actually argue that most of our
problems with executable email are due to MIME's success. It has been
embraced and extended by Outlook such that even text/plain is no longer
standard.
I used to be a fan of MIME. I now wish that we didn't have it. MIME
has permitted lots of innovation - and perhaps in some things one actually
doesn't want quite so much innovation.
] ON HUMILITY: to err is human. To moo, bovine. | firewalls [
] Michael Richardson, Xelerance Corporation, Ottawa, ON |net architect[
] mcr(_at_)xelerance(_dot_)com http://www.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca/mcr/
|device driver[
] panic("Just another Debian GNU/Linux using, kernel hacking, security guy"); [
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