Mimi Types

MIME, the Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions, is a freely available set of specifications that offers a way to interchange text in languages with different character sets, and multi-media e-mail among many different computer systems that use Internet mail standards as well as in a "text/html" form (RFC 1866), suitable for examination via a WWW browser.

If you were bored with plain text e-mail messages, thanks to MIME you now can create and read e-mail messages containing these things:

• character sets other than US-ASCII
• enriched text
• images
• sounds
• other messages (reliably encapsulated)
• tar files
• PostScript
• pointers to FTPable files
• other stuff

MIME supports not only several pre-defined types of non-textual message contents, such as 8-bit 8000Hz-sampled mu-LAW audio, GIF image files, and PostScript programs, but also permits you to define your own types of message parts.

Before MIME became widespread, you might have been able to create a message containing, say, a PostScript document and audio annotations, but more often then not, the message \was encoded in a proprietary, non-transportable format. That meant that you couldn't easily handle the same message on another vendor's workstation, or even get it intact through a mail gateway in the first place. Now, depending on the completeness of your MIME-capable mail system, there's a good chance that it'll "just work".

One of the best things about MIME is that it's a "four-wheel drive protocol" (to borrow a description applied originally to PhoneNet by Einar Stefferud). MIME was carefully designed to survive many of the most bizarre variations of SMTP, UUCP, and other Procrustean mail transport protocols that like to slice, dice, and stretch the headers and bodies of e-mail messages.

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