What is MIME ?
by Dr. Alex Yu “I sent an e-mail with an attached file to my co-worker at the University of Oklahoma, but he cannot read my file. The system says the file is encoded with MIME.” “I uploaded a Shockwave movie to my Web server, but I cannot see it in a Web browser even though I have installed the Shockwave plug-in” MIME as an Internet Protocol Are you familiar with these scenarios? What is MIME anyway? How can my friend, using another e-mail system, read my file? How can my Web clients look at my multimedia presentations on the Web such as Flash, Shockwave, and QuickTime? MIME stands for Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions or Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions . It is a encoding protocol like BinHex in Mac and UUEncode in UNIX. At first it was used as a way of sending more than just text via email. Later the protocol was extended to manage file typing by Web servers. Email attachment Let’s talk about email first. By using MIME, you can enclose the following types of binary file to yo
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is an Internet standard which allows transfer of binary files (word-processing documents, spreadsheets, images, sounds, etc.) between any compliant mailers, such as Alpine. You can get technical information about MIME from the section Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) in the Alpine Technical Notes. Ongoing discussion on MIME takes place in the newsgroup comp.mail.mime. There is also a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list about MIME that is posted regularly to the newsgroups comp.mail.mime, comp.answers and news.answers, and also accessible at the URLs: • ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/mail/mime-faq/ • ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/news.answers/mail/mime-faq/ • http://www.cs.ruu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/mail/mime-faq/.html The MIME FAQ contains an appendix with useful information about MIME types.
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is an Internet standard which allows transfer of binary files (word-processing documents, spreadsheets, images, sounds, etc.) between any compliant mailers, such as Pine. You can get technical information about MIME from the section Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) in the Pine Technical Notes. Ongoing discussion on MIME takes place in the newsgroup comp.mail.mime. There is also a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list about MIME that is posted regularly to the newsgroups comp.mail.mime, comp.answers and news.answers, and also accessible at the URLs: • ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/mail/mime-faq/ • ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/news.answers/mail/mime-faq/ • http://www.cs.ruu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/mail/mime-faq/.html The MIME FAQ contains an appendix with useful information about MIME types.
