A Tribute to Nathaniel Borenstein
- Bernard DAUVERGNE
- Dec 19, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 6
The Architect of MIME, and One of the Quiet Giants Who Shaped the Modern World
"300 Billion Emails a Day" — AI-generated conceptual visualization of large-scale email structures.
There are inventors whose names fill history books. And then there are those whose ideas become so deeply embedded in daily life that the world forgets where they came from.
Nathaniel Borenstein belongs to this second category, and his influence is far greater than most people realize.
In the early 1990s, when the Internet was still a fragile and idealistic experiment, he co-designed a standard that quietly but profoundly changed the nature of global communication:
MIME — Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
MIME allowed email to carry far more than plain text. It enabled the rich, expressive medium we use today — supporting documents, images, PDFs, spreadsheets, digital signatures, HTML content, emojis, and countless attachment formats.
Before MIME, email was little more than a digital postcard. After MIME, it became a universal vessel for human communication and organizational exchange.
Today, more than 370 billion emails are exchanged every single day. And far beyond email itself, MIME’s content-type system underpins images, videos, audio, and data across the web — making it one of the most widely deployed technologies on Earth.
This isn’t hyperbole. It is simply the scale of its impact.
A Brilliant Vision Hiding in Plain Sight
Borenstein’s original question was disarmingly simple:
Why can’t email express more than plain text?
His answer gave email richness, structure, and universality — including the ability to travel across languages and cultures through character sets that earlier systems struggled to support.
MIME is one of the hidden foundations of our digital world.
A Beautiful Mess — and a Great Success
By allowing email to carry everything, MIME also allowed email to become everything:
nested multipart messages,
cascades of encodings,
HTML inside text inside HTML,
duplicated attachments and legacy formats,
structures from the 1990s coexisting with modern ones,
archives that no human — and very few machines — fully understand anymore.
This is not a flaw. It is the natural consequence of a system designed to evolve.
Email became the world’s common language. Complexity was the price of universality.
From Overflowing Inboxes to Invisible Infrastructure
Email was never designed to become corporate memory — yet it did.
Today, the sheer accumulation of decades of messages and attachments has overwhelmed tools that were originally built for individual correspondence. Modern AI assistants read flattened representations of emails, but do not truly understand their structure, history, or continuity.
We now generate more organizational knowledge than we can retrieve —and more decisions than we can remember.
For the first time in decades, meaning must be reconstructed from the inside out.
This is the vision we will present during our keynote at the France Pavilion at CES 2026.
Every contract sent, every PDF exchanged, every image forwarded, every operational decision taken through email exists because a group of inventors expanded the expressive power of a technology that was never designed for such ambition.
Thank you, Nathaniel. Your work shaped the modern digital landscape —and continues to inspire those trying to bring structure and meaning to what it made possible.
Ref: This historical video captures one of the earliest demonstrations of multimedia email, illustrating the context and vision that led to the creation of MIME:
See other posts: https://www.iristia.ai/blog
Comments