Friday 25 April 2003 — This is over 21 years old. Be careful.
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.”
Comments
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.
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