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Modern e-mail messages contain a wide variety of data including images, sound files and other binary information. E-mail messages may be specially formatted by adding specific descriptions to all of the parts which make up the message. Consider a message composed in HTML format that includes a GIF and an WAV attachment. This message has three distinct parts. It would benefit the mail reader on the receiving end if it had some way to understand the composition of each of the three parts. With this information, the mail reader could display the message in HTML, display the GIF and play the WAV file. Standard e-mail messages do not provide this type of information, so a standard format has been created to describe message parts in a consistent manner. Any mail program which conforms to this standard will be able to describe its own messages and interpret messages created by other systems. This standard format is known as MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). MIMEMultipurpose Internet Mail Extensions The purpose of MIME is to describe the many parts of the modern e-mail message, such as images, audio files and other attachments. Messages encoded with MIME, may consist of many parts. MIME allows each part to be described in detail. Some parts of a MIME formatted message may even be encoded with an encoding method, like Base 64. For example, a MIME message may include a plain text message and a GIF image. The GIF image is binary data which consists of 8 bit characters. To get the GIF image data to pass through the Internet, Base 64 could be used to encode the data into 6-bit characters. On a larger scale MIME is used to annotate the parts of the message so that the receiving mail reader will know what data is stored in the message and optionally process it. For example, instead of listing the GIF file as a generic attachment, it may display it automatically.
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