What is MIME?

Acronym for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. The standard for attaching binary files to Internet mail messages. The MIME standard has come to be used in many situations where one cmputer programs needs to communicate with another program about what kind of file is being sent.

For example, HTML files have a MIME-type of text/html, JPEG files are image/jpeg, etc.

More common MIME types:

    text/plain                the usual mail message
    image/gif                 a common image format
    application/octet-stream  unknown type, 8-bit data
    audio/midi                midi music format
    audio/x-midi              alternate for the above

An email program is said to be MIME Compliant if it can both send and receive files using MIME. When binary files are sent using the MIME standard they are converted (encoded) into text for mailing and then decoded by the receiving mailer.