A MIME Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Randal L. Schwartz

The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) standard has been around for nearly a decade, but has only recently become popular. This is probably because of the higher bandwidth data connections available for email, as well as the advent of the Web, and the desktop horsepower required to make things that are fancier than plain text (or should that be text/plain)?

MIME is both a blessing, and a curse, in my opinion. It's cool that I can send a PDF or a JPEG to a friend as an attachment, and know that I don't need to figure out if they have a uu-decoder or a shell to extract from a sharchive. It's bad, however, because a lot of mail that is really just plain old text is being sent as HTML mail or the very popular "multipart/alternative" mail.

Why is this bad? Well, for one, I don't think Tim Berners-Lee or any of the chaps involved with the creation of the Web envisioned HTML as a medium for email. HTML is about hyperlinks and structured text, readable in an interactive environment. Email is a simple message, usually conversational, and generally with an absence of a need for markups and links.

So most of the use of HTML mail these days is by the "push advertisers", or as we more often call them, "spammers". It's a great way to shove a flashy, sizzly, no-content ad for fax paper or a trip to Central America into our email boxes, with enough bouncy clicky things that we'll probably respond.

A more serious problem with HTML email is that it's a great carrier of Javascript viruses. Countless times I've read about people getting nailed because of embedded codes in HTML email. Thus, it's a security threat to organizations.

That's why I think mail should always be plain text, unless both parties agree otherwise. Go ahead, shoot me, but there's my opinion.<>