Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
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Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is a standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message bodies may consist of multiple parts, and header information may be specified in non-ASCII character sets. Email messages with MIME formatting are typically transmitted with standard protocols, such as the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Post Office Protocol (POP), and the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
~19 min read
Encyclopedic overview
23 sectionsContents
- History
- MIME header fields
- MIME-Version
- Content-Disposition
- Content-Transfer-Encoding
- Difference between Q-encoding and quoted-printable
- Multipart messages
- Multipart subtypes
- mixed
- digest
- alternative
- related
- report
- signed
- encrypted
- form-data
- x-mixed-replace
- byterange
- RFC documentation
- See also
- References
- Further reading
- External links
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is a standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message bodies may consist of multiple parts, and header information may be specified in non-ASCII character sets. Email messages with MIME formatting are typically transmitted with standard protocols, such as the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Post Office Protocol (POP), and the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
MIME is an Internet standard specified in the following request for comments (RFC) publications: , , , , and . The integration with SMTP email is specified in and .
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.