RFC 2049 (rfc2049) - Page 1 of 24
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Five: Conformance Criteria and Examples
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group N. Freed
Request for Comments: 2049 Innosoft
Obsoletes: 1521, 1522, 1590 N. Borenstein
Category: Standards Track First Virtual
November 1996
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
(MIME) Part Five:
Conformance Criteria and Examples
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
STD 11, RFC 822, defines a message representation protocol specifying
considerable detail about US-ASCII message headers, and leaves the
message content, or message body, as flat US-ASCII text. This set of
documents, collectively called the Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions, or MIME, redefines the format of messages to allow for
(1) textual message bodies in character sets other than
US-ASCII,
(2) an extensible set of different formats for non-textual
message bodies,
(3) multi-part message bodies, and
(4) textual header information in character sets other than
US-ASCII.
These documents are based on earlier work documented in RFC 934, STD
11, and RFC 1049, but extends and revises them. Because RFC 822 said
so little about message bodies, these documents are largely
orthogonal to (rather than a revision of) RFC 822.
The initial document in this set, RFC 2045, specifies the various
headers used to describe the structure of MIME messages. The second
document defines the general structure of the MIME media typing
system and defines an initial set of media types. The third
document, RFC 2047, describes extensions to RFC 822 to allow non-US-
Freed & Borenstein Standards Track