RFC 1341 MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
Network Working Group N. Borenstein, Bellcore
Request for Comments: 1341 N. Freed, Innosoft
June 1992
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions): Mechanisms for Specifying
and Describing
the Format of Internet
Message Bodies
Status of this Memo
This RFC specifies an IAB standards
track protocol for the
Internet
community, and requests discussion
and suggestions
for improvements.
Please refer to the current edition
of
the "IAB Official
Protocol Standards" for the
standardization state and status
of this protocol.
Distribution
of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
RFC 822 defines a message representation
protocol which
specifies considerable
detail about message headers,
but
which leaves the message content,
or message body, as flat
ASCII
text. This document redefines
the format of message
bodies to
allow multi-part textual and non-textual
message
bodies to be represented
and exchanged without loss of
information. This is based on
earlier work documented in
RFC
934 and RFC 1049, but extends
and revises that work.
Because
RFC 822 said so little about message
bodies, this
document is largely
orthogonal to (rather than a revision
of) RFC 822.
In particular, this document
is designed to provide
facilities
to include multiple objects in a
single message,
to represent body
text in character sets other
than US-
ASCII, to represent
formatted multi-font text messages,
to
represent non-textual material
such as images and audio
fragments,
and generally to facilitate
later extensions
defining new types
of Internet mail for use by cooperating
mail agents.
This document does NOT extend Internet
mail header fields to
permit anything
other than US-ASCII text data.
It is
recognized that such extensions
are necessary, and they are
the
subject of a companion document [RFC
-1342].
A table of contents appears at the
end of this document.