MIME:

Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME)

Neetu Bharti Trainee,NCSI, Click to edit Master subtitle style IISC,Bangalore-12 2001-2002

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Date of Presentation:07/Mar/2002

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Definition of MIME Introduction What exactly is MIME? How it Works? MIME-Specific Technical Definitions Example of MIME Summary

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Definition of MIME
MIME, stand for Multi-purpose Internet mail
Extensions, is a freely available specification that offers a way to interchange text in languages with different character sets, and multimedia e-mail among many different computer system that use Internet mail standards.

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What exactly is MIME?

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In 1992, a new standard was defined by an Internet engineering task force working group in RFC1521 & 1522 called MIME. MIME is an extension to the Internet mail standard, known as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that allows mail messages containing different type of multimedia information to be sent across the network this includes, but is not limited to, word-processor documents, spreadsheets, programs, graphics, audio, and motion picture files, as well as links

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MIME is a specification for enhancing the capabilities of standard Internet e-mail. It offers a simple standardized way to represent and encode a wide variety of media types of transmission via Internet mail. It is defines extensions to SMTP to support binary attachments of arbitrary format. The designers of MIME have learned a lot from the old SMTP protocol and its mailers. MIME is here to stay and it works.

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When using the MIME standard, messages can contain the following types: l Text message in US-ASCII l Character set other than US-ASCII l Multiple objects in a single messages l Multimedia; Image, Audio, and Video messages l Multi-front messages l Messages of unlimited length l Binary files

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MIME is defined to be completely backwards compatible, yet flexible and open to extensions. Therefore, it builds on the older standard by defining additional fields for the mail message header, that describes new content types, and a distinct organization of the message body.

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How MIME works?

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The developers of MIME found a clever way to work around the limitation. It packages different data types into a 7-bit ASCII format. that way, all e-mail, regardless of the data it contains, appears as standard e-mail messages to the internets SMTP servers. The beauty of the solution lies in the fact that SMTP didnt have to change to handle such data.

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Uses a new binary encoding scheme called BASE 64 New SMTP headers describe the attached document User agents read the header to figure out how to interpret the message

MIME: MIME Specific technical definition

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New MIME headers The Content-type headers The Application-type headers The Content-transfer-Encoding The Content-ID &Content Description Multipart Message Non-ASCII text in mail messages

MIME: MIME Object Security Services ( MOSS) that uses the MIME Object Security Services(MOSS) is a protocol
multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted framework to apply digital signatureandencryptionservices toMIMEobjects. The services are offered through the use of end-to-endcryptography between an originator and a recipient at theapplication layer. MOSS was never widely deployed and is now abandoned, largely due to the popularity ofPGP.