RFC 1521 (rfc1521) - Page 2 of 81

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies

Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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RFC 1521                          MIME                    September 1993


Table of Contents

   1.     Introduction.......................................  3
   2.     Notations, Conventions, and Generic BNF Grammar....  6
   3.     The MIME-Version Header Field......................  7
   4.     The Content-Type Header Field......................  9
   5.     The Content-Transfer-Encoding Header Field......... 13
   5.1.   Quoted-Printable Content-Transfer-Encoding......... 18
   5.2.   Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding................... 21
   6.     Additional Content-Header Fields................... 23
   6.1.   Optional Content-ID Header Field................... 23
   6.2.   Optional Content-Description Header Field.......... 24
   7.     The Predefined Content-Type Values................. 24
   7.1.   The Text Content-Type.............................. 24
   7.1.1. The charset parameter.............................. 25
   7.1.2. The Text/plain subtype............................. 28
   7.2.   The Multipart Content-Type......................... 28
   7.2.1. Multipart:  The common syntax...................... 29
   7.2.2. The Multipart/mixed (primary) subtype.............. 34
   7.2.3. The Multipart/alternative subtype.................. 34
   7.2.4. The Multipart/digest subtype....................... 36
   7.2.5. The Multipart/parallel subtype..................... 37
   7.2.6. Other Multipart subtypes........................... 37
   7.3.   The Message Content-Type........................... 38
   7.3.1. The Message/rfc822 (primary) subtype............... 38
   7.3.2. The Message/Partial subtype........................ 39
   7.3.3. The Message/External-Body subtype.................. 42
   7.3.3.1.  The "ftp" and "tftp" access-types............... 44
   7.3.3.2.  The "anon-ftp" access-type...................... 45
   7.3.3.3.  The "local-file" and "afs" access-types......... 45
   7.3.3.4.  The "mail-server" access-type................... 45
   7.3.3.5.  Examples and Further Explanations............... 46
   7.4.   The Application Content-Type....................... 49
   7.4.1. The Application/Octet-Stream (primary) subtype..... 50
   7.4.2. The Application/PostScript subtype................. 50
   7.4.3. Other Application subtypes......................... 53
   7.5.   The Image Content-Type............................. 53
   7.6.   The Audio Content-Type............................. 54
   7.7.   The Video Content-Type............................. 54
   7.8.   Experimental Content-Type Values................... 54
   8.     Summary............................................ 56
   9.     Security Considerations............................ 56
   10.    Authors' Addresses................................. 57
   11.    Acknowledgements................................... 58
   Appendix A -- Minimal MIME-Conformance.................... 60
   Appendix B -- General Guidelines For Sending Email Data... 63
   Appendix C -- A Complex Multipart Example................. 66
   Appendix D -- Collected Grammar........................... 68



Borenstein & Freed
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