Multipurpose Internet Messaging Extensions
n. (MIME, abbr.)
A standard (RFC 2045) that allows complex data formats to be sent as the content of email.
Notes
The email standard RFC 822 says little about the content of message bodies. The MIME provides specifications for textual message bodies in character sets other than US-ASCII, an extensible set of different formats for nontextual message bodies, multipart message bodies, and textual header information in character sets other than US-ASCII. See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2045.html.
