With the advent of MIME, IMAP2 was extended to support MIME body structures and add mailbox management functionality ( create, delete, rename, message upload ) that was absent in IMAP2.

The IMAP4 protocol allows clients to separately retrieve any of the individual MIME parts and also to retrieve portions of either individual parts or the entire message.

Parts of MIME are also reused in communication protocols such as HTTP, which requires that data be transmitted in the context of email-like messages even though the data might not ( and usually doesn't ) actually have anything to do with email, and the message body can actually be binary.

MIME defines a collection of email headers for specifying additional attributes of a message including content type, and defines a set of transfer encodings which can be used to represent 8-bit binary data using characters from the 7-bit ASCII character set.

MIME also specifies rules for encoding non-ASCII characters in email message headers, such as " Subject :", allowing these header fields to contain non-English characters.

These goals were achieved by using additional RFC 822-style headers for all MIME message attributes and by making the MIME headers optional with default values ensuring a non-MIME message is interpreted correctly by a MIME-capable client.

A simple MIME text message is therefore likely to be interpreted correctly by a non-MIME client even if it has email headers which the non-MIME client won't know how to interpret.

There's a similar header called Message-ID which assigns a unique identifier to the message as a whole ; this is not actually part of the MIME standards, since it can be used on non-MIME as well as MIME messages.

Since RFC 2822, conforming message header names and values should be ASCII characters ; values that contain non-ASCII data should use the MIME encoded-word syntax ( RFC 2047 ) instead of a literal string.

A MIME multipart message contains a boundary in the " Content-Type: " header ; this boundary, which must not occur in any of the parts, is placed between the parts, and at the beginning and end of the body of the message, as follows:

This is a message with multiple parts in MIME format.

The MIME standard defines various multipart-message subtypes, which specify the nature of the message parts and their relationship to one another.

For example, a multipart MIME message using the digest subtype would have its Content-Type set as " multipart / digest ".

Rfc822 is a misnomer, since the message may be a full MIME message.

When a document is transmitted via a MIME message or a transport that uses MIME content types such as an HTTP response, the message may signal the encoding via a Content-Type header, such as.

Base64 is commonly used in a number of applications including email via MIME, and storing complex data in XML.

* MIME supplements the e-mail formatting rules to allow non-English text in both e-mail headers and bodies, and defines a mechanism for including non-textual attachments in e-mail bodies

MIME defines mechanisms for sending other kinds of information in e-mail, including text in languages other than English, using character encodings other than ASCII.

Some people, including yEnc's creator, have suggested including yEnc as part of MIME, which would solve nearly all of its problems and retain the low encoding overhead.

M + NetMail is designed around open standards, including LDAP, PKCS, iCal, POP3, IMAP4, SSL, and S / MIME.

When sending plain text or HTML format messages, some versions of Outlook ( apparently including Outlook 2000 ) prefer MIME, but may still use TNEF under some circumstances ( for example, if an Outlook feature requires it ).

Outlook Web App is used to access e-mail ( including support for S / MIME ), calendars, contacts, tasks, documents ( used with SharePoint or in 2010, Office Web Apps ), and other mailbox content when access to the Microsoft Outlook desktop application is unavailable.

While the ASCII range is encoded as one octet, as in UTF-8, the ASCII octets 0x21-0x7E ( decimal 33-126 ) are also used in UTF-1 multi-byte encodings ; therefore UTF-1 is unsuited for many Internet protocols, including MIME.

An attached file with TNEF encoding is most often named winmail. dat or win. dat, and has a MIME type of Application / MS-TNEF.

When PNG development started in early 1995, developers decided not to incorporate support for animation, because the majority of the PNG developers felt that overloading a single file type with both still and animation features is a bad design, both for users ( who have no simple way of determining to which class a given image file belongs ) and for web servers ( which should use the image / foo MIME type for stills and video / foo for animations -- GIF notwithstanding ).

Another important standard supported by most email clients is MIME, which is used to send binary file email attachments.

* GPE-Filemanager-A file manager with MIME type and remote access support

The filename extension of " ics " is to be used to designate a file containing ( an arbitrary set of ) calendaring and scheduling information consistent with this MIME content type.

The filename extension of " ifb " is to be used to designate a file containing free or busy time information consistent with this MIME content type.

The file type code of " iCal " is to be used in Apple Macintosh operating system environments to designate a file containing calendaring and scheduling information consistent with this MIME media type.

The file type code of " iFBf " is to be used in Apple Macintosh operating system environments to designate a file containing free or busy time information consistent with this MIME media type.

If this " plain text " convention is not followed, then the CSV file no longer contains sufficient information to interpret it correctly, the CSV file will not likely survive transmission across differing computer architectures, and will not conform to the text / csv MIME type.

; MIME types: Instruct the server how to treat different varying file types.

The kinemage information is stored in a human-as well as machine-readable text file that describes the hierarchy of display objects and their properties, and that also includes optional explanatory text ; the kinemage format is a defined chemical MIME type of ' chemical / x-kinemage ' with the file extension '. kin '.

* the. MIM (. mim ) file extension, which is interchangeable with. MIME or. mime and identifies a MIME-encoded file

Email standards such as MIME don't specify any file size limits, but in practice email users will find that they can't send very large files.

Email users can be puzzled by these limits because the MIME encoding adds 33 % overhead – so that a 20MB document on disk exceeds a 25MB file attachment limit.

MHTML, short for MIME HTML, is a web page archive format used to combine resources that are typically represented by external links ( such as images, Flash animations, Java applets, audio files ) together with HTML code into a single file.

The content of an MHTML file is encoded as if it were an HTML e-mail message, using the MIME type.

Even more generally, any message that an S / MIME email client stores encrypted cannot be decrypted if the applicable key pair's private key is unavailable or otherwise unusable ( e. g., the certificate has been deleted or lost or the private key's password has been forgotten ).

When saving, a default filename for the specified MIME type is generally used.