(Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk
I have to agree with this too! The whole point of MIME and attachments is to provide a mechanism for transmitting information of kinds which plain-text mail is not suitable for. People need to be able to send and receive such information.
In most cases, the 33% size increase, the possibilities for interception and mail munging make it a fairly poor mechanism for file transfer. A useful last resort, though.
I can see the point of MIME for one-off rich content, but that doesn't seem the most common legitimate use and the illegitimate uses dwarf legitimate ones. On balance, MIME seems to have turned out to be evil.
ObTopic: I'd be surprised if ocr'ing spam images worked well and what would happen when it saw one of the worms with an image that tries to exploit an error in a common graphics library?
Hope that helps,