All posts tagged MIME

By on March 12, 2012

The #MIME20 Twinterview Round Up

To mark the 20th anniversary of MIME we hosted a live interview on Twitter – a “Twinterview” – with one of MIME’s co-creators Dr Nathaniel Borenstein. At 3pm on Wednesday our eyes were glued to our screens as the #MIME20 tweets came in thick and fast!

Here are the highlights, as we learnt a great deal about MIME from Nathaniel’s answers.

philcorfan ‏ @philcorfan

Right, here’s my #MIME20 question for @drmime… Can you explain, in 140 characters(!), why MIME was so important?

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 MIME provides a standard & simple way to identify & share any kind of data across platforms.

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 Without MIME, we’d have, in effect, hundreds of separate Internets, mostly vendor-specific.

Steven Ambrose ‏ @ambio

@ambio: @drmime Do you see any newer or more secure protocols?

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 Newer protocols, absolutely. But MIME as a data format is much easier for new protocols to adopt than replace

philcorfan ‏ @philcorfan

#MIME20 @drmime You say you made mistakes in developing MIME, with the benefit of hindsight, what would you have done differently?

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 @philcorfan We botched anticipation of future changes to MIME, but as no major changes were ever needed it’s merely embarrassing.

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 @philcorfan We also didn’t make Content-Disposition clear enough to keep vendors from screwing it up.

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 @philcorfan Those are my two biggest regrets, so I guess it could be a lot worse. However, the error anticipating future…

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 @philcorfan …changes results in 19 wasted bytes in every MIME object. I estimate it wastes 7 petabytes/year in global bandwidth.

Justin Pirie ‏ @justinpirie

@drmime And do you think that backwards compatibility was one of the main reasons for MIME’s success? #MIME20

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 @justinpirie That’s why MIME chose backwards compatibility w/7bit SMTP over a lovely new protocol requiring global retrofit.

To our great disappointment there were no questions about Bellcore’s very own barbership quartet the Telephone Chords. But there were some enthralling questions about the meaning behind the name MIME:

Kirstin Beveridge ‏ @KeBeveridge

@drmime #MIME20 Why did you choose the name MIME? Be honest, is it just because it’s a cool acronym? :)

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 @KeBeveridge Basically yes — a cool name promotes adoption, it’s technical marketing. In fact, I believe that the best advice…

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 @KeBeveridge …I ever got in my career was from Dave Crocker, author of the original email standards. He said: Find a catchy name.

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

#MIME20 @KeBeveridge Catchy name means people say “I want MIME” instead of “I want RFC 1341.” Names are hooks on which we hang ideas.

The Twinterview came to a close at 4pm with this final question:

John Rivers ‏ @johnrivers

#MIME20 @drmime did you face any sceptics when you invented MIME?

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

Oh yes. Why do we need pictures/attachments? Backward compatibility? Even “Why do we need non-English email”!!! #MIME20@johnrivers

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

Fortunately, we didn’t need to convince everyone it was necessary, just that it wasn’t harmful. That was easier. #MIME20 @johnrivers

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

Politically, MIME was achieved by coalition of people with different goals that were mutually compatible. #MIME20 @johnrivers

Nathaniel Borenstein ‏ @drmime

Essentially, they humored each other to gain critical mass. Technical politics is much like any other politics. #MIME20 @johnrivers

A big thank you to Nathaniel for being a great interviewee.

And of course thank you to all who contributed in the Q&A, we hope you all enjoyed participating and unearthed some new knowledge about MIME and emails.

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By on March 12, 2012

Looking Backwards: Eight Lessons from Twenty Years of MIME

After this week’s celebration of MIME’s 20th anniversary, I expected to feel sated enough leave it alone for another 20 years. But I think it might be worth writing just a bit more, summarizing the lessons MIME might teach about how to create a successful technology standard.

1.  Where you work matters. I devoted roughly 2 years of my life to defining MIME. Not that many employers would tolerate that, but I was a researcher at Bellcore, with a broad mandate to promote more bandwidth use in the future. Other companies support standards work, but few to the extent that Bellcore supported me. It would have been hard to create MIME while working for most technology companies.

2.  Address a real need. Most people didn’t know it yet, but the world really needed an interoperable, open standard for multimedia data; almost everything on today’s Internet reflects this reality. I realized it early because I had built a multimedia email system at Carnegie Mellon, and Steve Jobs had followed up with something similar at NeXT, but the two systems couldn’t exchange multimedia data with each other. I knew that some day I wanted to get pictures of my grandchildren by email, but I didn’t want my kids and I to have to use the same email software.

3.  Address another real need. Any standard will face barriers to adoption, at least from the inertia of the installed base; meeting two major needs can increase the number of people who care, and hence the pressure for adoption. In the case of MIME, multimedia junkies like me were able to make common cause with the deep desire of people around the world to send email in languages other than English. These problems could have been solved separately, but a standard that solved both surely hastened adoption, perhaps even making the difference between success and failure.

4.  Connect the dots and share the credit. Some successful teams self-assemble, but behind most successful teams is a visionary who figured out what parts needed to be brought together. In the case of MIME, the visionary was the late Einar Stefferud, who introduced me to Ned Freed and suggested that we collaborate on the work that became MIME.

Sharing the credit is remarkably useful in leading argumentative technology gurus to consensus. At the end of the MIME standard, there’s a long list of acknowledgements of people who helped draft the standard. I found that adding someone to this list made them less argumentative. There’s no downside to sharing credit generously.

5.  Keep your goals modest, realistic, and limited. I know, extending email to include all human languages and all media types doesn’t sound like a limited goal, but the truth is that we achieved those goals via a very limited mechanism. We avoided trying to settle as many battles as we could, preferring instead to create a framework for the debate to continue. Thus, MIME doesn’t declare  JPEG a better image format than GIF, or PDF superior to HTML and DOC; we just made it possible to unambiguously define labels for these types, such as image/gif and image/jpeg. (The wisdom of this approach is clearest when you consider applying it to the natural language problem: had we tried to specify that everyone should always speak English, or Chinese, we would never have found consensus.)

6.  Acknowledge that your vision is limited. Standards designers tend to overspecify; MIME was designed in the aftermath of X.400, a proposed email standard that failed in large part due to its complexity. Rather than try to imagine every future use of MIME, we created an initial set of media types, and a registry for defining new ones. The result is that the number of media types has grown from under 20 in the original standard to over 1,300 today.

7.  Worry about branding and marketing. This is the lesson I find hardest to convey to technically-oriented people, who tend to dismiss anything non-technical as fluff. The fact is, technologies are adopted (or not) by people, who are subject to a wide range of influences. Good publicity and catchy names really matter.

In fact, the best advice I’ve gotten in my entire career came from Dave Crocker, the author of the original Internet email standards, who convinced me to come up with a clever name or acronym. I laughed, but he was insistent, so after 15 minutes I came up with “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions” — MIME which, because it is much catchier than, say, RFC 1341, is often used conversationally.

Essentially, because people have heard the name MIME and perhaps have a vague idea what it is, I have instant credibility with total strangers.

8.  Give it away. If you want to see a standard adopted, it helps to produce a solid implementation and release it as open source software. I built a software package called metamail, a standalone MIME implementation for UNIX that could be plugged into any mail reader, and released it to the world when the MIME spec was stable. Combine real need and free software, and things happen fast. Within a few days, I received patches that made it work on DOS, while Macintosh, Amiga, and others were not far behind. Again, credit is due Bellcore, for supporting building such software only to give it away.

There are other lessons, I’m sure, but most relate to technical details and are unlikely to be of wider value. So now, perhaps, I can stop writing about MIME for another ten or twenty years and see what it looks like then.

Photo CC via Len Radin, Dave Gray & Þorgerður Olafsdottir on Flickr

 

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By on March 8, 2012

The History of MIME Infographic

Can you imagine not being able to send attachments via email? Probably not, but there was a time, only 20 years ago when sending an attachment would have been unthinkable by most.

The invention of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) was a critical moment in the history of email. It transformed email from the simple text-only messaging system first demonstrated in 1965, to the extra-ordinarily successful communication and collaboration tool that we all know and love today.

Thanks to the development of the MIME standard, email has become quite possibly the most important business tool of our time – check out the infographic below for the full story.

Also available on Flickr.

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By on March 1, 2012

Twinterview with MIME co-creator, Nathaniel Borenstein

Almost twenty years ago, Mimecast’s very own Chief Scientist Dr. Nathaniel Borenstein co-created the email format Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension protocol (MIME) and, in doing so, laid the foundations for email to become the world’s dominant personal and business communication tool.

Before MIME, you couldn’t attach or embed anything to an email- no pictures, word documents, files or anything.

MIME enabled people to send and receive attachments via email, and an estimated 1 trillion MIME attachments are still exchanged every day!

I didn’t know until this week that the very first attachment was an image and audio clip of Nathaniel with his fellow Telephone Chords barbershop quartet members singing a short jingle about MIME written to the tune of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”.

To mark the anniversary (and demonstrate his continued love of all popular communications channels!), Nathaniel is hosting a twitter interview – twinterview – to answer any burning questions you may have about MIME, innovation, the evolution and future of email, email’s position in an increasingly social world, how to turn an idea into a world standard… and even barbershop quartets!

Nathaniel will be taking part in the twinterview for a full hour from his own Twitter account @drmime, and is taking all queries so get thinking! All questions should feature the hashtag #MIME20 to ensure Nathaniel sees them. His responses will also include the tag so you can watch the whole interview unravel.

Date: 7th March 2012

Time: 3pm GMT

Hashtag: #MIME20

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By on February 29, 2012

MIME @ 20: A Happy Anniversary

A lot can change in 20 years.

In 1992, only a few people had cell phones, or even knew what email was. South African whites were voting to end apartheid, the first shouts of “Wayne’s World!” echoed through the newly opened EuroDisney, in the newly constituted European Union.  Isaac Asimov and Benny Hill died, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez were born, and Microsoft finally found a market with version 3.1 of Windows.

Also new that year was MIME, the now-ubiquitous Internet standard for multimedia data — for me, the culmination of seven years of work researching, developing, and standardizing multimedia email. Twenty years later, my best guess is that MIME is used roughly a trillion times daily. But in 1992, a single MIME message made a bit of a splash among the few who knew about it.

That message — often referred to as the first MIME message, but more accurately called the first interesting MIME message — circled the globe in March 1992, sharing globally a JPEG image and an audio clip of my barbershop chorus, Bellcore’s Telephone Chords, singing “Let Me Send You Email.” You can see the barbershop MIME message here.

Next week — on Monday, March 5 — ACS, the corporate successor to Bellcore, is hosting a celebration of MIME’s 20th anniversary. Old Bellcore hands will reunite, I’ll give a brief talk, as will my partner-in-MIME, Ned Freed, via video link. I’ll try to draw a few serious lessons from the MIME story (“Eight Non-Technical Factors in MIME’s Success”), and for fun, I’ll also narrate and try to explain an amazing video from the recent MIT puzzle contest, featuring two mimes miming twenty MIME types. And finally, inevitably, the Telephone Chords will reunite to sing that same song, hoping that this time I hit all the right notes.

On a personal level, my primary reaction to all this is simply:  Where has the time gone? Can it really be 20 years?

Well, yes; it’s a whole different world. Twenty years ago, when people asked why I was so passionate about this technology, I’d say, “Some day I’ll have grandchildren, and I want to get pictures of them by email.” This generally made people laugh — it was an absurd notion, given the costs of computers, bandwidth, and digitizing photographs. Today, as I receive regular in-utero pictures of my third grandchild, I find it hard to explain to younger folks why this ever seemed unlikely. Can it really be a mere 20 years?

As proud as I am of the MIME work, I don’t really believe it deserves as much attention as it gets. We made several mistakes, but fortunately not enough to make up for being in the right place at the right time. I’ve done plenty of things in my career that I thought were under-recognized, so I can’t shed too many tears about this one being over-recognized. It all feels rather random.

I’ve had plenty of adventures in the last 20 years, raised a family, made and lost a fortune, gotten thicker and grayer. MIME hasn’t given me a fraction of the joy that I’ve gotten from my children and grandchildren. Yet the word MIME is probably as inevitable in my future obiturary as the obituary itself. I figure that on Monday I should simply relax and enjoy the show. If you’re going to be in New Jersey on Monday and would like to join in, drop me a line!

Photo CC via Magdalena Swebodzinska on Flickr

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By on December 10, 2010

A Short History of Email’s Future

Scarcely a year out of the past 30 have gone by without someone making radical predictions about the future of email.  A few have even been right.  Facebook has reopened the topic with predictions of how the new Facebook Messages product will shape email’s future — a scant five months after their COO predicted the death of email.  Both predictions echoed similar musings from decades past.

Predictions of the death of email go back to email’s beginnings as an extension to the FTP program.  This ugly hack, which allowed researchers on perhaps dozens of machines to send each other messages, was widely seen as a scandalous waste of expensive resources, and more than a few system managers expected to stamp it out.  They were wrong.  And although I’ve devoted nearly my entire career to email, I blush to admit that my first assessment of it, in 1978, was that it was a useless toy.  I was wrong.  (In my defense I will point out that our campus’ single computer wasn’t on a network, and all the terminals were in a single room, so email was no more useful than another new high-tech product, the post-it note.)  In the following years, I’ve probably heard dozens of “death of email” predictions before Facebook’s.  They were all wrong.

Spam, everyone’s favorite email villain, made its debut in the 1970′s as well, and although it didn’t become a major problem until much later, some technologists immediately went to work to “fix the problem.”  Most of them expected quick success.  They were wrong.  A few, like Bill Gates 20 years later, were bold enough to predict the complete eradication of spam by a date certain.  They were very wrong.

In a related topic, hundreds of technologists and privacy advocates have predicted that the widespread use of encryption would soon make email more private and secure.  But people seem to want privacy at any price, as long as it’s free.  If it requires a single extra step, they tend to reject it.  The encryption-boosters were wrong.

Another recurring prediction has been the unification of email with other kinds of tools.  In 1982 I built a system known as BAGS, which integrated email, bulletin boards, and calendaring software.  The bulletin boards fit in very nicely, while the calendaring software did not.  I was wrong.  Years later, with RSS, voice mail, and fax seamlessly integrated into my mail reader, I still haven’t seen good integration of calendars or instant messaging.  This bodes well for some of Facebook’s plans, as the heart of Facebook is multiple RSS-like message streams.  But if they expect to be able to integrate too many other things into their mail interface, they’re wrong.

I spent roughly 9 years working on my greatest success, multimedia mail.  But I got a lot of it wrong.  In the late 1980′s I built an open source multimedia mail reader — coincidentally also named Messages — and expected the world to beat a path to my door.  I was wrong, but at least it was a mistake that led to MIME.  And although MIME seemed like the biggest revolution in the history of email, it only succeeded because it was designed to be evolutionary.

I also expected to transform email with what I called “active messages” — messages containing programs in a restricted, safe language, to be executed when viewed.  I developed two such languages, and demonstrated some remarkable applications, but I completely missed what the emerging Web was doing to the idea.  Email that contains a web link can do almost anything an active message can do, so there’s little appetite for developing an active messaging infrastructure.  I was wrong.

Predicting the future is hard.  Even successful predictions tend to be partial.  When people asked why I was working so hard to create multimedia email, I used to say, “Some day I’ll have grandchildren, and I want to get cute pictures by email.”  Most people laughed, and they were wrong.  But I expected my daughters to scan printed photos, never anticipating cheap digital cameras.  And I certainly didn’t expect that magic first emailed picture to be a sonogram of a pair of zygotes, just a few days after in vitro fertilization and implantation.  (Cute pictures were still 8 months away.)  I wasn’t exactly wrong, but it wasn’t what I expected, either.

So, I trust you’ll pardon my cynicism when I hear about the next revolution in email.  What I’ve seen, for over 30 years now, is the gradual evolution and expansion of email’s capabilities, its reach, and yes, its flaws.  Facebook may well contribute to the next steps in that evolution, and I look forward to their innovations, but I don’t expect any revolutions.

Of course, I may be wrong.

And if you didn’t already guess what the pictures were- they are the long-anticipated first emailed picture of my granddaughters — possibly the greatest anticlimax of all time.  This is what I worked 8 years, and then waited 16 more years, to receive (above and below):

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