https://www.ingber.com/utils_mime.txt From daemon@docserver.cac.washington.edu Wed Mar 13 14:10:41 1996 Date: Wed, 13 Mar 96 13:49:42 -0800 To: Lester Ingber From: UW Email Robot Subject: The MIME information you requested (last changed Oct 23 15:09) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- What is MIME? MIME stands for "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions". It is the standard for how to send multipart, multimedia, and binary data using the world-wide Internet email system. Typical uses of MIME include sending images, audio, wordprocessing documents, programs, or even plain text files when it is important that the mail system does not modify any part of the file. MIME also allows for labelling message parts so that a recipient (or mail program) may determine what to do with them. How can I read a MIME message? Since MIME is only a few years old, there are still some mailers in use which do not understand MIME messages. However, there are a growing number of mail programs that have MIME support built-in. (One popular MIME-capable mailer for Unix, VMS and PCs is Pine, developed at the University of Washington and available via anonymous FTP from the host ftp.cac.washington.edu in the file /pine/pine.tar.Z) In addition, several proprietary email systems provide MIME translation capability in their Internet gateway products. However, even if you do not have access to a MIME-capable mailer or suitable gateway, there is still hope! There are a number of stand-alone programs that can interpret a MIME message. One of the more versatile is called "munpack". It was developed at Carnegie Mellon University and is available via anonymous FTP from the host ftp.andrew.cmu.edu in the directory pub/mpack/. There are versions available for Unix, PC, Mac and Amiga systems. For compabibility with older forms of transferring binary files, the munpack program can also decode messages in split-uuencoded format. Does MIME replace UUENCODE? Yes. UUENCODE has been used for some time for encoding binary files so that they can be sent via Internet mail, but it has several technical limitations and interoperability problems. MIME uses a more robust encoding called "Base64" which has been carefully designed to survive the message transformations made by certain email gateways. How can I learn more about MIME? The MIME Internet standard is described in RFC-1521, available via anonymous FTP from many different Internet hosts, including: o US East Coast Address: ds.internic.net (198.49.45.10) o US West Coast Address: ftp.isi.edu (128.9.0.32) o Pacific Rim Address: munnari.oz.au (128.250.1.21) o Europe Address: nic.nordu.net (192.36.148.17) Look for the file /rfc/rfc1521.txt Another source of information is the Internet news group "comp.mail.mime", which includes a periodic posting of a "Frequently Asked Questions" list. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- $Id: utils_mime.txt,v 1.2 2010/07/17 02:01:52 ingber Exp ingber $