Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)

MIME is known as Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). It builds on the older standard by standardizing additional fields for mail message headers that describe new types of content and organization for messags.

MIME allows mail messages to contain :

• Multiple objects in a single message.
• Text having unlimited line length or overall length.
• Character sets other than ASCII, allowing non-english language messages.
• Multi-font messages.
• Binary or application specific files.
• Images, Audio, Video and multimedia messages.

MIME devines the following new header fields :

1. The MIME Version header field which uses a version number to declare that a message conforms to the MIME standard.
2. The Content-Type header field, which can be used to specify the type and subtype of data in the body of a message and to fully specify the encoding of data.
3. The Content-Transfer-Encoding header field that specifies how the data is encoded to allow it to pass through mail transports having data or character set limitations.
4. Two header fields that can be used to further identify and describe the data in a message body : the Content ID and Content Description header fields.