Unicode Explained

Characters in MIME

MIME

is a protocol that makes it possible to send text data by email using different

encodings, not just ASCII, which is the original encoding for Internet email. MIME has

other purposes and applications as well, such as sending nontextual data by email.

An email message that uses MIME has special headers as illustrated in the preceding

section. The headers are used to specify the general data format of the message as well

as its character encoding. It may also specify the transfer encoding (see Chapter 6) used

for the data.

Media Types

Internet media types , often called MIME types, can be used to specify a major media

type (“top level media type,” such as text), a subtype (such as html), and an encoding

(such as iso-8859-1). They were originally developed to allow the use of email for

sending formats other than plain ASCII data. They can be (and should be) also used

Figure 10-2. View of an incoming email message with headers in Thunderbird

Characters in MIME | 509

for specifying the encoding

when character data is sent over a network—e.g., by email

or using the HTTP protocol on the World Wide Web.

Originally, “MIME” was short for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. The idea

was to extend the capabilities of Internet email from the original content format, which

is plain ...