I totally echo the OP (Disclaimer: I work at a big data analytics SaaS with IoT customers called Treasure Data).

The "unsexy" IoT can be really unsexy. One customer wanted to get their data out of SCADA (www.scada.com), and as it turns out, the only way to get telemetry data out of their SCADA boxes was through emails as CSV attachments.

We ended up working with a third party dev shop to build a simple mail server that parses the incoming CSVs and send them to our backend so that the vendor could analyze the data coming from SCADA (which in turn came from heavy industry devices) using SQL, Salesforce, etc.

I never thought that MIME attachments would be a critical part in a "big data", "IoT" analytics pipeline...