MIME AND ITS TYPE

MIME Overview by Mark Grand Internet e-mail allows mail messages to be exchanged between users of computers around the world and occasionally beyond… to space shuttles. One of the main reasons that Internet e-mail has achieved such wide use is because it provides a standard mechanism for messages to be exchanged between over 1,000,000 computers connected to the Internet. The standards that are the basis for Internet e-mail were established in 1982. Though they were state of the art in 1982, in the intervening years they have begun to show their age. The 1982 standards allow for mail messages that contain a single human readable message with the restrictions that: • the message contains only ASCII characters. • the message contains no lines longer than 1000 characters. • the message does not exceed a certain length The 1982 standards do not allow EDI to be transmitted through Internet mail, since EDI messages can violate all of these restrictions. There are a number of other types of me...