What does MIME stand for?

MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.

MIME was created to expand early email beyond plain ASCII text. The original Internet mail standards handled relatively simple text, but MIME added a structured way to send character sets, formatted content, images, audio, video, and files as part of an email message.

A MIME message uses headers such as Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding to describe and safely package each part. Attachments are commonly represented with types such as application/pdf or image/jpeg, while Base64 encoding allows binary data to travel through systems designed originally for text.

MIME is not an email-delivery protocol. SMTP transports messages, while MIME defines how their content is organized. The same MIME media-type system is also used by web servers and HTTP, which is why browsers can identify formats such as text/html and image/png.