MIME (short for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is an Internet standard that extends email format support by:
- text in a non-ASCII character set
- attachments that are not text
- multipart message body
- message header information in non-ASCII fonts
With MIME, you can write emails with accents, use digital signatures, or attach files in different formats, for example.
Basically all e-mail that is written by humans and a significant part of automated e-mail is transmitted via the protocol SMTP in MIME format.
