Mr. Anonymous does well to remain anonymous. His comments are embarassing to him. Naturally the idea is old -- I explicitly mentioned NeXT mail, didn't I? The point is that this is an open, non-proprietary, and STANDARDIZED framework for doing arbitrary recursive encapsulation of data in EMail. Perry anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com says:
Once you've seen a secretary who barely understands anything drag a spreadsheet into a mail message and send it to someone on another continent who, equally ignorantly, just double-clicks on it and then has the spreadsheet program launch, you will understand what the point of MIME is.
Is this what the big deal about MIME is?
Damn, I've been doing this (cutting and pasting spreadsheets, launching them by double clicking) for years now on Mac's and PC's running Windows. Heck, under NeXTSTEP as well.