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Concept
MIME
Summary
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet 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).
The MIME standard is specified in a series of requests for comments: ,
and
The integration with SMTP email is specified in
and
Although the MIME formalism was designed mainly for SMTP, its content types are also important in other communication protocols. In the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for the World Wide Web, servers insert a MIME header field at the beginning of any Web transmission. Clients use the content type or media type header to select an appropriate viewer application for the type of data indicated.
MIME originated from the Andrew Messaging System, which was part of Andrew Project developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), as a cross-platform alternative to the Andrew-specific data format.
The presence of this header field indicates the message is MIME-formatted. The value is typically "1.0". The field appears as follows:
MIME-Version: 1.0
According to MIME co-creator Nathaniel Borenstein, the version number was introduced to permit changes to the MIME protocol in subsequent versions. However, Borenstein admitted short-comings in the specification that hindered the implementation of this feature: "We did not adequately specify how to handle a future MIME version. ... So if you write something that knows 1.0, what should you do if you encounter 2.0 or 1.1? I sort of thought it was obvious but it turned out everyone implemented that in different ways. And the result is that it would be just about impossible for the Internet to ever define a 2.
Official source
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