MIME message structure

Friday 25 April 2003

You'd think after 18 months of working on the Kubi Client, I would be able to do MIME structures in my sleep. But I had to look it up again today, so I'm putting this here so I can find it again. Also, I figure if I need to look something up, someone else out there may find it useful.

There are three commonly-used Content-Type headers for structuring MIME messages:

multipart/mixed for adding attachments to a message,
multipart/related for combining inline images with a message, and
mulitpart/alternative for collecting different representations of a message.

For example (indentation is just for cosmetic presentation):

Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="mixed-boundary" This is a multipart message in MIME format. --mixed-boundary Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary="related-boundary" --related-boundary Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="alternative-boundary" --alternative-boundary Content-Type: text/html <html><body><p>This is the HTML message.</p></body></html> --alternative-boundary Content-Type: text/plain This is the plain text message. --alternative-boundary-- --related-boundary Content-Type: image/jpeg (.. jpeg data ..) --related-boundary-- --mixed-boundary Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="file.dat" Content-Disposition: attachment; name="file.dat" (.. file.dat data ..) --mixed-boundary--

There. As Maude said, "Now I'll always know where it is."

tagged: networks, email» 1 reaction

Comments

Sarah 12:20 PM on 6 Feb 2006

Hi,

Thanks for your mini-article on MIME structure. I'm currently learning more than I want to about this topic, but, also currently, know less than I need. And, 'Harold and Maude' was one of my favourite films ever.

MIME message structure

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