Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME)

MIME:

Contents
Definition

of MIME Introduction What exactly is MIME? How it Works? MIME-Specific Technical Definitions Example of MIME Summary

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Definition of MIME
MIME, stand for Multi-purpose Internet mail
Extensions, is a freely available specification that offers a way to interchange text in languages with different character sets, and multimedia e-mail among many different computer system that use Internet mail standards.

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Introduction
MIME extends the format of Internet mail to allow non-US-ASCII textual messages, non-textual messages, multipart message bodies, and non-US-ASCII information in message headers. MIME provides Internet mail users with functionality similar to that of MS-Mail for LAN-based internal mail. MS-Mail and MIME allow the attachment of files and other objects, as does MIME. Unfortunately, Microsofts method of handling these attachments is undertaken through a proprietary format and MS-Mail does not provide compliance with the MIME open standard.

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Internet messages with MIME attachments send to MS-Mail will transfer the appropriate text portions of the message, but MS-Mail will generally forward the attachments as encoded text, which may then be saved to a file and decoded. Conversely, messages sent from MS-Mail with attachments to an Internet MIME mail system will transfer the text portions and send the attachments as encoding text, but use a different method of encoding from the used by MIME and without the information needed for processing the message attachment by the recipient. Email messages arriving at the National Library with MIME attachments are likely to be corrupted.

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What exactly is MIME?

In

1992, a new standard was defined by an Internet engineering task force working group in RFC1521 & 1522 called MIME. MIME is an extension to the Internet mail standard, known as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that allows mail messages containing different type of multimedia information to be sent across the network this includes, but is not limited to, word-processor documents, spreadsheets, programs, graphics, audio, and motion picture files, as well as links that enable users to retrieve information from remote databases from within a mail message.

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Cont
MIME

is a specification for enhancing the capabilities of standard Internet e-mail. It offers a simple standardized way to represent and encode a wide variety of media types of transmission via Internet mail. It is defines extensions to SMTP to support binary attachments of arbitrary format. The designers of MIME have learned a lot from the old SMTP protocol and its mailers. MIME is here to stay and it works.

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When using the MIME standard, messages can contain the following types: Text message in US-ASCII Character set other than US-ASCII Multiple objects in a single messages Multimedia; Image, Audio, and Video messages Multi-front messages Messages of unlimited length Binary files

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MIME is defined to be completely backwards compatible, yet flexible and open to extensions. Therefore, it builds on the older standard by defining additional fields for the mail message header, that describes new content types, and a distinct organization of the message body.

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How MIME works?

The

developers of MIME found a clever way to work around the limitation. It packages different data types into a 7-bit ASCII format. that way, all e-mail, regardless of the data it contains, appears as standard e-mail messages to the internets SMTP servers. The beauty of the solution lies in the fact that SMTP didnt have to change to handle such data.

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Uses

a new binary encoding scheme called BASE 64 New SMTP headers describe the attached document User agents read the header to figure out how to interpret the message

MIME: MIME Specific technical definition

New

MIME headers The Content-type headers The Application-type headers The Content-transfer-Encoding The Content-ID &Content Description Multipart Message Non-ASCII text in mail messages

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New MIME headers

Required fields
MIME

Optional fields
Content-

- Version Date - Time

type Content-transfer_encoding Content-ID Content-description Content-disposition

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The Content-type Header

Content-type

sub-type describes what format this part of the message is in Text Image Message Audio Application Video Multipart
The

default type is simple ASCII text MIME-Version : 1.0 Content-type:text/plain;charset=US-ascii

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The Content-type Applications

Subtypes: Postscript Octet-Stream-Unidentified binary data Many other will be added

MIME: The Content-transfer-Encoding

Base64

encoding algorithm is used to encode binary data in 7bit ASCII data Quoted-printable is for text-only messages A few others 7bit No encoding Case insensitive 8bit No encoding Binary No encoding X-token No encoding Example

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Summary
MIME

has been designed to avoid problems caused by additional restrictions imposed by some Internet mail transport mechanisms. The Multipart and Message content types allow mixing and hierarchical structuring of objects of different types in a single message. Further content types provide a mechanism for tagging messages or body parts as audio, image, or other kinds of data. Finally, a number of useful content types are defined for general use by consenting user agents, notably Text/Richtext, Message/Partial, and Message/External-Body.