Dave wrote:
Doesn't non-mime mean just us-ascii, ie just Roman alphabet, no accents? Wouldn't that be a bit limiting for non-English speaking email users?
It would also mean no rick text (fonts, colours, etc). That wouldn't bother me and I'm pretty sure MJR would love it, but its unrealistic to think that if Mime hadn't been invented then something else wouldn't have. (And we could UUencode attachments long before Mime was everywhere; all Mime really added to the party was rich text and internationalisation.)
If somebody had invented a rich-text alternative to email, along the lines of which you could argue that WWW is a rich-text alternative to gopher, then we'd all be stuck with that instead. At least email as it stands can swing both ways.
The nostalgia part of my brain longs for the days of multi-part UU-encoded files downloaded over a 9600 modem (my 2400 modem couldn't cope so I upgraded it), but I'm not sure the Internet would be so useful today had it not moved on.