Of course, electronic mail is not the only application that could benefit enormously from
the widespread adoption of a standard format for multimedia data exchange. However, it
is a logical application to pioneer the development of such a format. To begin with,
standards are more critical to multimedia mail than to other applications. Further,
electronic mail systems operate under a huge and diverse set of constraints. In particular,
email needs to work interoperably on virtually every kind of computer ever built. This
adds enormous complexity when one considers machines with unusual byte or word size,
In fact, within a few months after the publication of the MIME standard, MIME was
already in use as the basic multimedia format for a half dozen non-mail applications, and
its use is being proposed in a wide range of other areas. Thus while the demands of
electronic mail were critical to the definition of MIME -- and will play a prominent role,
in this paper, in explaining the design of MIME -- the applicability of MIME has a far
broader potential range.