RFC 2049 (rfc2049) - Page 2 of 24
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Five: Conformance Criteria and Examples
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2049 MIME Conformance November 1996 ASCII text data in Internet mail header fields. The fourth document, RFC 2048, specifies various IANA registration procedures for MIME- related facilities. This fifth and final document describes MIME conformance criteria as well as providing some illustrative examples of MIME message formats, acknowledgements, and the bibliography. These documents are revisions of RFCs 1521, 1522, and 1590, which themselves were revisions of RFCs 1341 and 1342. Appendix B of this document describes differences and changes from previous versions. Table of Contents 1. Introduction .......................................... 2 2. MIME Conformance ...................................... 2 3. Guidelines for Sending Email Data ..................... 6 4. Canonical Encoding Model .............................. 9 5. Summary ............................................... 12 6. Security Considerations ............................... 12 7. Authors' Addresses .................................... 12 8. Acknowledgements ...................................... 13 A. A Complex Multipart Example ........................... 15 B. Changes from RFC 1521, 1522, and 1590 ................. 16 C. References ............................................ 20 1. Introduction The first and second documents in this set define MIME header fields and the initial set of MIME media types. The third document describes extensions to RFC 822 formats to allow for character sets other than US-ASCII. This document describes what portions of MIME must be supported by a conformant MIME implementation. It also describes various pitfalls of contemporary messaging systems as well as the canonical encoding model MIME is based on. 2. MIME Conformance The mechanisms described in these documents are open-ended. It is definitely not expected that all implementations will support all available media types, nor that they will all share the same extensions. In order to promote interoperability, however, it is useful to define the concept of "MIME-conformance" to define a certain level of implementation that allows the useful interworking of messages with content that differs from US-ASCII text. In this section, we specify the requirements for such conformance. Freed & Borenstein Standards Track
