On Sat, Mar 11, 2017 at 6:05 PM, Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:

Possible? Yes. Convenient? No.

You could cat several uuencode files together and send them in one email. You'd have to edit them on the receiving end into separate files and uudecode them separately. In practice, you'd uuencode a tarball.

MIME was a major advance, and what's telling is that 25 years later, SMTP/MIME is still the standard.

This is so interesting. Not to be argumentative about it but I felt it was actually something of a regression. Something like making a file available via an FTP server (possible in an executable but unreadable directory with an obscure name) or just in some directory in an organization where a filesystem was shared and sending a pointer to the file via email seemed much more efficient, particularly if one was sending to multiple recipients. Attaching files to email as MIME components felt like trying to turn email into a filesystem, and SMTP into a file transfer protocol. The way I saw it, email was email and we already had file transfer protocols....

It seemed like MIME really took off when Microsoft embraced it; before that, plain ol' text seemed much more common. My sense at the time was that networked filesystems and services like FTP (or the then-nascent HTTP) were far less commonplace on the MS platform, so email as a content distribution mechanism was more natural in that world. I was somewhat dismayed at the inability to make Windows users see the light; in retrospect, of course, this just means that I myself was missing something critical.

Mary Ann, why did you consider it such a step forward? I'm really curious about the reasoning from folks involved with such things at the time.

- Dan C.