MIME File Documentation

Overview

Feature Value
Main Purpose Extending email standards to support text in character sets other than ASCII, non-text attachments, message bodies with multiple parts, header information in non-ASCII character sets.
Introduced 1991
Standardization RFC 2045 through RFC 2049
Base Format Text
MIME Type Example text/html
Character Encoding Support Multiple (e.g., UTF-8, ISO 8859-1)
Attachment Support Yes
Multi-part Messages Supported
Image Format Support Yes (e.g., image/png, image/jpeg)
Audio Format Support Yes (e.g., audio/mpeg, audio/ogg)
Video Format Support Yes (e.g., video/mp4)
Application Data Support Yes (e.g., application/json, application/pdf)
Text Format Support Yes (e.g., text/plain, text/css, text/csv)
Header Info In Non-ASCII Supported
Accessibility Universal across email clients and web browsers
Content-Type Header Specifies the media type of the resource or data.
Content-Disposition Header Indicates if the content is expected to be displayed inline in the browser or to be downloaded as an attachment.
Content-Transfer-Encoding Header Specifies the encoding used to safely transfer the entity to the user.
Boundary Delimiter Used in multipart messages to separate parts.
Extension Mechanisms Allows for future extensions without changing the core MIME standards.