In particular, there is no reason, in principle, why email should not include text in any of the world's languages and character sets, nor why email should not include pictures, sounds, animations, active spreadsheets, or any other kind of data that can be stored on a computer. In recent years, various research systems and even some commercial products have extended email to include some or all of these capabilities. Until recently, however, none of them worked together, and all of them required whole communities of users to abandon their old tools en masse in favor of the new tools of a single software vendor.
Recent developments have the promise of changing all of that.
There is a new proposed standard for the format of multimedia mail, which would make software from different vendors able to work together smoothly with multimedia mail, as they do now with plain text mail. The software being announced here implements that proposed standard, but takes it a step further by incorporating it into the existing tools with which people read mail today, allowing multimedia mail to be adopted in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary fashion. At a heterogeneous site where many mail readers are in use, the mailcap mechanism can be used to extend them all to support new types of multimedia mail by a single addition to a mailcap file. However, beyond this core mechanism, the distribution includes viewers for a number of mail types defined by the MIME standard, so that it is useful immediately and without any special site-specific customization or extension. Multipart mail, combining several other types 7.