Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME)

• Goals

  • Multimedia, multi-language, multi-component extension of RFC-822
  • Full backward compatibility with RFC-822
  • Open design to incorporate multiple well-known formats
  • Easy extension to new types and formats

• Retain RFC-822 header+body format

• Add new header fields

• Allow for multipart multimedia bodies

• Include media type and encoding information in new header fields such as: Content-Type, Content-Description, Content-Transfer-Encoding, Content-ID

• Retain 7-bit ASCII for all valid encoding schemes

• Implement multi-component bodies via a special 'magic type' Content-Type: multipart

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