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	RFC 1341:

        Title:      MIME  (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions):
                    Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing
                    the Format of Internet Message Bodies
       	Author:     N. Borenstein & N. Freed
	Mailbox:    nsb@bellcore.com, ned@innosoft.com
        PS-Pages:   69           ASCII-Pages:   80
        PS-Characters:   347,082 ASCII-Characters:  211,117
	Updates/Obsoletes:  none


RFC 822 defines a message representation protocol which specifies
considerable detail about message headers, but which leaves the
message content, or message body, as flat ASCII text.  This document
redefines the format of message bodies to allow multi-part textual and
non-textual message bodies to be represented and exchanged without
loss of information.  This is based on earlier work documented in RFC
934 and RFC 1049, but extends and revises that work.  Because RFC 822
said so little about message bodies, this document is largely
orthogonal to (rather than a revision of) RFC 822.

In particular, this document is designed to provide facilities to
include multiple objects in a single message, to represent body text
in character sets other than US-ASCII, to represent formatted
multi-font text messages, to represent non-textual material such as
images and audio fragments, and generally to facilitate later
extensions defining new types of Internet mail for use by cooperating
mail agents.

This document does NOT extend Internet mail header fields to permit
anything other than US-ASCII text data.  It is recognized that such
extensions are necessary, and they are the subject of a companion
document (RFC 1342).  This document is the product of the Internet
Message Extensions Working Group of the IETF.

This is now a Proposed Standard Protocol.

This RFC specifies an IAB standards track protocol for the Internet
community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
Please refer to the current edition of the "IAB Official Protocol
Standards" for the standardization state and status of this protocol.
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Joyce K. Reynolds
USC/Information Sciences Institute