What is a MIME format

Philippines
April 10, 2007 4:18pm CST
Hi guys can someone explain to me what does MIME format means? I have been encountering this in my e-mail messages.
1 response
peavey
@peavey (16936)
• United States
10 Apr 07
My understanding is that MIME (multipurpose internet mail extensions) extends SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), which is pretty basic text only email, to include http, diacritics and images. In other words, without MIME, email would be pretty boring and limited to a few languages.
Koalemos
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
10 Apr 07
This is precisely the purpose for MIME, and images and other non text data is encoded and decoded using base24. The original SMTP without MIME would only support ASCII, so as you say there would be nothing but basic text without it.