>A number of times it's been mentioned that IMAIL gets confused with complex
>MIME. Can anyone comment on what that means. For example:
>
>Is MIME dynamic, does it changes so often that it can't be understood?
Although MIME technically is dynamic (IE new content types can be created
at any time), the general format of MIME is static. However, it is fairly
complex.
>Is it proprietary so that only partnered sites can precisely interpret it?
No -- it's documented primary in RFC1521.
>Is "anyone" interpreting it correctly?
Virtually all mail clients interpret it correctly in almost all situations.
>I thought many email servers have open source such as sendmail. If so,
>then, isn't it just a matter of porting
>their code to a different language.
It's not that easy. First, most open source is copyrighted (even though it
is free), so you can't just port it. Typically, you either need to license
a component (in which case you may not have the source to it, and your
product relies on the support of the component), or you need to build your own.
To get an idea of the complexity, you need to realize that a whole E-mail
can be "encapsulated" in another E-mail. For example, you may have a
simply one-line E-mail that has a copy of another one-line E-mail in it
(the whole thing just has two MIME segments -- the one-line text of the
original E-mail, and another segment with the headers and body of the other
one-line E-mail). But then you could have a third E-mail that includes
this combined E-mail, so it's two layers deep (one E-mail containing a
second E-mail, that contains a third). Then, when you add HTML MIME
segments (which aren't attachments), and add attachments, things can get
confusing.
-Scott
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