13.5.1 MIME Overview

The conversion channel makes extensive use of the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) header lines. Knowledge of message construction and MIME header fields is required. For complete information on MIME, refer to RFCs 1806, 2045 through 2049, and 2183. A short overview of MIME is presented here for convenience.

13.5.1.1 Message Construction

A simple message consists of a header and a body. The header is at the top of the message and contains certain control information such as date, subject, sender, and recipient. The body is everything after the first blank line after the header. MIME specifies a way to construct more complex messages which can contain multiple body parts, and even body parts nested within body parts. Messages like these are called multi-part messages, and, as mentioned earlier, the conversion channel performs body part-by-body part processing of messages.

13.5.1.2 MIME Headers

The MIME specification defines a set of header lines for body parts. These include MIME-Version, Content-type, Content-Transfer-Encoding, Content-ID, and Content-disposition. The conversion channel uses the Content-type and Content-disposition headers most frequently. An example of some MIME header lines is shown below:

Content-type: APPLICATION/wordperfect5.1;name=Poem.wpc
Content-transfer-encoding: BASE64
Content-disposition: attachment; filename=Poem.wpc
Content-description: "Project documentation Draft1 wordperfect format"

MIME header lines are not the same as general, non-MIME header lines such as To:, Subject: and From:. Basically, for Conversion channel discussion, MIME header lines start with the string Content-.

Content-type Header

The MIME Content-Type header describes the content of the body-part. The Content-Type header format (with an example) is shown below:

Content-type: type/subtype; parameter=value; parameter=value...

type describes the type of content of the body part. Examples of type are Text, Multipart, Message, Application, Image, Audio, and Video.

subtype further describes content type. Each Content-type has its own set of subtypes. For examples: text/plain, application/octet-stream, and image/jpeg. Content Subtypes for MIME mail are assigned and listed by the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). A copy of the list is at http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types.

parameter is specific to Content-type/subtype pairs. For example, the charset and the name parameters are shown below:

Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-type: application/msword; name=temp.doc

The charset parameter specifies a character set for a textual message. The name parameter gives a suggested file name to be used if the data were to be written to a file.

Content-Type values, subtypes, and parameter names are case-insensitive.

Content-disposition Header

The MIME Content-disposition header provides presentation information for the body-part. It is often added to attachments specifying whether the attachment body part should be displayed (inline) or presented as a file name to be copied (attachment). The Content-disposition header has the following format:

Content-disposition: disposition_type; parameter=value;parameter=value...

disposition_type is usually inline (display the body part) or attachment (present as file to save.) Attachment usually has the parameter filename with a value specifying the suggested name for the saved file.

For details on the Content-disposition header, refer to RFC2183.