7Network Working Group N. Freed
8Request for Comments: 2045 Innosoft
9Obsoletes: 1521, 1522, 1590 N. Borenstein
10Category: Standards Track First Virtual
14 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
16 Format of Internet Message Bodies
20 This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
21 Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
22 improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
23 Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
24 and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
28 STD 11, RFC 822, defines a message representation protocol specifying
29 considerable detail about US-ASCII message headers, and leaves the
30 message content, or message body, as flat US-ASCII text. This set of
31 documents, collectively called the Multipurpose Internet Mail
32 Extensions, or MIME, redefines the format of messages to allow for
34 (1) textual message bodies in character sets other than
37 (2) an extensible set of different formats for non-textual
40 (3) multi-part message bodies, and
42 (4) textual header information in character sets other than
45 These documents are based on earlier work documented in RFC 934, STD
46 11, and RFC 1049, but extends and revises them. Because RFC 822 said
47 so little about message bodies, these documents are largely
48 orthogonal to (rather than a revision of) RFC 822.
50 This initial document specifies the various headers used to describe
51 the structure of MIME messages. The second document, RFC 2046,
52 defines the general structure of the MIME media typing system and
53 defines an initial set of media types. The third document, RFC 2047,
54 describes extensions to RFC 822 to allow non-US-ASCII text data in
58Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 1]
60RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
63 Internet mail header fields. The fourth document, RFC 2048, specifies
64 various IANA registration procedures for MIME-related facilities. The
65 fifth and final document, RFC 2049, describes MIME conformance
66 criteria as well as providing some illustrative examples of MIME
67 message formats, acknowledgements, and the bibliography.
69 These documents are revisions of RFCs 1521, 1522, and 1590, which
70 themselves were revisions of RFCs 1341 and 1342. An appendix in RFC
71 2049 describes differences and changes from previous versions.
75 1. Introduction ......................................... 3
76 2. Definitions, Conventions, and Generic BNF Grammar .... 5
77 2.1 CRLF ................................................ 5
78 2.2 Character Set ....................................... 6
79 2.3 Message ............................................. 6
80 2.4 Entity .............................................. 6
81 2.5 Body Part ........................................... 7
82 2.6 Body ................................................ 7
83 2.7 7bit Data ........................................... 7
84 2.8 8bit Data ........................................... 7
85 2.9 Binary Data ......................................... 7
86 2.10 Lines .............................................. 7
87 3. MIME Header Fields ................................... 8
88 4. MIME-Version Header Field ............................ 8
89 5. Content-Type Header Field ............................ 10
90 5.1 Syntax of the Content-Type Header Field ............. 12
91 5.2 Content-Type Defaults ............................... 14
92 6. Content-Transfer-Encoding Header Field ............... 14
93 6.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding Syntax .................... 14
94 6.2 Content-Transfer-Encodings Semantics ................ 15
95 6.3 New Content-Transfer-Encodings ...................... 16
96 6.4 Interpretation and Use .............................. 16
97 6.5 Translating Encodings ............................... 18
98 6.6 Canonical Encoding Model ............................ 19
99 6.7 Quoted-Printable Content-Transfer-Encoding .......... 19
100 6.8 Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding .................... 24
101 7. Content-ID Header Field .............................. 26
102 8. Content-Description Header Field ..................... 27
103 9. Additional MIME Header Fields ........................ 27
104 10. Summary ............................................. 27
105 11. Security Considerations ............................. 27
106 12. Authors' Addresses .................................. 28
107 A. Collected Grammar .................................... 29
114Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 2]
116RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
121 Since its publication in 1982, RFC 822 has defined the standard
122 format of textual mail messages on the Internet. Its success has
123 been such that the RFC 822 format has been adopted, wholly or
124 partially, well beyond the confines of the Internet and the Internet
125 SMTP transport defined by RFC 821. As the format has seen wider use,
126 a number of limitations have proven increasingly restrictive for the
129 RFC 822 was intended to specify a format for text messages. As such,
130 non-text messages, such as multimedia messages that might include
131 audio or images, are simply not mentioned. Even in the case of text,
132 however, RFC 822 is inadequate for the needs of mail users whose
133 languages require the use of character sets richer than US-ASCII.
134 Since RFC 822 does not specify mechanisms for mail containing audio,
135 video, Asian language text, or even text in most European languages,
136 additional specifications are needed.
138 One of the notable limitations of RFC 821/822 based mail systems is
139 the fact that they limit the contents of electronic mail messages to
140 relatively short lines (e.g. 1000 characters or less [RFC-821]) of
141 7bit US-ASCII. This forces users to convert any non-textual data
142 that they may wish to send into seven-bit bytes representable as
143 printable US-ASCII characters before invoking a local mail UA (User
144 Agent, a program with which human users send and receive mail).
145 Examples of such encodings currently used in the Internet include
146 pure hexadecimal, uuencode, the 3-in-4 base 64 scheme specified in
147 RFC 1421, the Andrew Toolkit Representation [ATK], and many others.
149 The limitations of RFC 822 mail become even more apparent as gateways
150 are designed to allow for the exchange of mail messages between RFC
151 822 hosts and X.400 hosts. X.400 [X400] specifies mechanisms for the
152 inclusion of non-textual material within electronic mail messages.
153 The current standards for the mapping of X.400 messages to RFC 822
154 messages specify either that X.400 non-textual material must be
155 converted to (not encoded in) IA5Text format, or that they must be
156 discarded, notifying the RFC 822 user that discarding has occurred.
157 This is clearly undesirable, as information that a user may wish to
158 receive is lost. Even though a user agent may not have the
159 capability of dealing with the non-textual material, the user might
160 have some mechanism external to the UA that can extract useful
161 information from the material. Moreover, it does not allow for the
162 fact that the message may eventually be gatewayed back into an X.400
163 message handling system (i.e., the X.400 message is "tunneled"
164 through Internet mail), where the non-textual information would
165 definitely become useful again.
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172RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
175 This document describes several mechanisms that combine to solve most
176 of these problems without introducing any serious incompatibilities
177 with the existing world of RFC 822 mail. In particular, it
180 (1) A MIME-Version header field, which uses a version
181 number to declare a message to be conformant with MIME
182 and allows mail processing agents to distinguish
183 between such messages and those generated by older or
184 non-conformant software, which are presumed to lack
187 (2) A Content-Type header field, generalized from RFC 1049,
188 which can be used to specify the media type and subtype
189 of data in the body of a message and to fully specify
190 the native representation (canonical form) of such
193 (3) A Content-Transfer-Encoding header field, which can be
194 used to specify both the encoding transformation that
195 was applied to the body and the domain of the result.
196 Encoding transformations other than the identity
197 transformation are usually applied to data in order to
198 allow it to pass through mail transport mechanisms
199 which may have data or character set limitations.
201 (4) Two additional header fields that can be used to
202 further describe the data in a body, the Content-ID and
203 Content-Description header fields.
205 All of the header fields defined in this document are subject to the
206 general syntactic rules for header fields specified in RFC 822. In
207 particular, all of these header fields except for Content-Disposition
208 can include RFC 822 comments, which have no semantic content and
209 should be ignored during MIME processing.
211 Finally, to specify and promote interoperability, RFC 2049 provides a
212 basic applicability statement for a subset of the above mechanisms
213 that defines a minimal level of "conformance" with this document.
215 HISTORICAL NOTE: Several of the mechanisms described in this set of
216 documents may seem somewhat strange or even baroque at first reading.
217 It is important to note that compatibility with existing standards
218 AND robustness across existing practice were two of the highest
219 priorities of the working group that developed this set of documents.
220 In particular, compatibility was always favored over elegance.
226Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 4]
228RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
231 Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official
232 Protocol Standards" for the standardization state and status of this
233 protocol. RFC 822 and STD 3, RFC 1123 also provide essential
234 background for MIME since no conforming implementation of MIME can
235 violate them. In addition, several other informational RFC documents
236 will be of interest to the MIME implementor, in particular RFC 1344,
237 RFC 1345, and RFC 1524.
2392. Definitions, Conventions, and Generic BNF Grammar
241 Although the mechanisms specified in this set of documents are all
242 described in prose, most are also described formally in the augmented
243 BNF notation of RFC 822. Implementors will need to be familiar with
244 this notation in order to understand this set of documents, and are
245 referred to RFC 822 for a complete explanation of the augmented BNF
248 Some of the augmented BNF in this set of documents makes named
249 references to syntax rules defined in RFC 822. A complete formal
250 grammar, then, is obtained by combining the collected grammar
251 appendices in each document in this set with the BNF of RFC 822 plus
252 the modifications to RFC 822 defined in RFC 1123 (which specifically
253 changes the syntax for `return', `date' and `mailbox').
255 All numeric and octet values are given in decimal notation in this
256 set of documents. All media type values, subtype values, and
257 parameter names as defined are case-insensitive. However, parameter
258 values are case-sensitive unless otherwise specified for the specific
261 FORMATTING NOTE: Notes, such at this one, provide additional
262 nonessential information which may be skipped by the reader without
263 missing anything essential. The primary purpose of these non-
264 essential notes is to convey information about the rationale of this
265 set of documents, or to place these documents in the proper
266 historical or evolutionary context. Such information may in
267 particular be skipped by those who are focused entirely on building a
268 conformant implementation, but may be of use to those who wish to
269 understand why certain design choices were made.
273 The term CRLF, in this set of documents, refers to the sequence of
274 octets corresponding to the two US-ASCII characters CR (decimal value
275 13) and LF (decimal value 10) which, taken together, in this order,
276 denote a line break in RFC 822 mail.
282Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 5]
284RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
289 The term "character set" is used in MIME to refer to a method of
290 converting a sequence of octets into a sequence of characters. Note
291 that unconditional and unambiguous conversion in the other direction
292 is not required, in that not all characters may be representable by a
293 given character set and a character set may provide more than one
294 sequence of octets to represent a particular sequence of characters.
296 This definition is intended to allow various kinds of character
297 encodings, from simple single-table mappings such as US-ASCII to
298 complex table switching methods such as those that use ISO 2022's
299 techniques, to be used as character sets. However, the definition
300 associated with a MIME character set name must fully specify the
301 mapping to be performed. In particular, use of external profiling
302 information to determine the exact mapping is not permitted.
304 NOTE: The term "character set" was originally to describe such
305 straightforward schemes as US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1 which have a
306 simple one-to-one mapping from single octets to single characters.
307 Multi-octet coded character sets and switching techniques make the
308 situation more complex. For example, some communities use the term
309 "character encoding" for what MIME calls a "character set", while
310 using the phrase "coded character set" to denote an abstract mapping
311 from integers (not octets) to characters.
315 The term "message", when not further qualified, means either a
316 (complete or "top-level") RFC 822 message being transferred on a
317 network, or a message encapsulated in a body of type "message/rfc822"
318 or "message/partial".
322 The term "entity", refers specifically to the MIME-defined header
323 fields and contents of either a message or one of the parts in the
324 body of a multipart entity. The specification of such entities is
325 the essence of MIME. Since the contents of an entity are often
326 called the "body", it makes sense to speak about the body of an
327 entity. Any sort of field may be present in the header of an entity,
328 but only those fields whose names begin with "content-" actually have
329 any MIME-related meaning. Note that this does NOT imply thay they
330 have no meaning at all -- an entity that is also a message has non-
331 MIME header fields whose meanings are defined by RFC 822.
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340RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
345 The term "body part" refers to an entity inside of a multipart
350 The term "body", when not further qualified, means the body of an
351 entity, that is, the body of either a message or of a body part.
353 NOTE: The previous four definitions are clearly circular. This is
354 unavoidable, since the overall structure of a MIME message is indeed
359 "7bit data" refers to data that is all represented as relatively
360 short lines with 998 octets or less between CRLF line separation
361 sequences [RFC-821]. No octets with decimal values greater than 127
362 are allowed and neither are NULs (octets with decimal value 0). CR
363 (decimal value 13) and LF (decimal value 10) octets only occur as
364 part of CRLF line separation sequences.
368 "8bit data" refers to data that is all represented as relatively
369 short lines with 998 octets or less between CRLF line separation
370 sequences [RFC-821]), but octets with decimal values greater than 127
371 may be used. As with "7bit data" CR and LF octets only occur as part
372 of CRLF line separation sequences and no NULs are allowed.
376 "Binary data" refers to data where any sequence of octets whatsoever
381 "Lines" are defined as sequences of octets separated by a CRLF
382 sequences. This is consistent with both RFC 821 and RFC 822.
383 "Lines" only refers to a unit of data in a message, which may or may
384 not correspond to something that is actually displayed by a user
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401 MIME defines a number of new RFC 822 header fields that are used to
402 describe the content of a MIME entity. These header fields occur in
403 at least two contexts:
405 (1) As part of a regular RFC 822 message header.
407 (2) In a MIME body part header within a multipart
410 The formal definition of these header fields is as follows:
412 entity-headers := [ content CRLF ]
416 *( MIME-extension-field CRLF )
418 MIME-message-headers := entity-headers
421 ; The ordering of the header
422 ; fields implied by this BNF
423 ; definition should be ignored.
425 MIME-part-headers := entity-headers
427 ; Any field not beginning with
428 ; "content-" can have no defined
429 ; meaning and may be ignored.
430 ; The ordering of the header
431 ; fields implied by this BNF
432 ; definition should be ignored.
434 The syntax of the various specific MIME header fields will be
435 described in the following sections.
4374. MIME-Version Header Field
439 Since RFC 822 was published in 1982, there has really been only one
440 format standard for Internet messages, and there has been little
441 perceived need to declare the format standard in use. This document
442 is an independent specification that complements RFC 822. Although
443 the extensions in this document have been defined in such a way as to
444 be compatible with RFC 822, there are still circumstances in which it
445 might be desirable for a mail-processing agent to know whether a
446 message was composed with the new standard in mind.
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452RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
455 Therefore, this document defines a new header field, "MIME-Version",
456 which is to be used to declare the version of the Internet message
457 body format standard in use.
459 Messages composed in accordance with this document MUST include such
460 a header field, with the following verbatim text:
464 The presence of this header field is an assertion that the message
465 has been composed in compliance with this document.
467 Since it is possible that a future document might extend the message
468 format standard again, a formal BNF is given for the content of the
471 version := "MIME-Version" ":" 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT
473 Thus, future format specifiers, which might replace or extend "1.0",
474 are constrained to be two integer fields, separated by a period. If
475 a message is received with a MIME-version value other than "1.0", it
476 cannot be assumed to conform with this document.
478 Note that the MIME-Version header field is required at the top level
479 of a message. It is not required for each body part of a multipart
480 entity. It is required for the embedded headers of a body of type
481 "message/rfc822" or "message/partial" if and only if the embedded
482 message is itself claimed to be MIME-conformant.
484 It is not possible to fully specify how a mail reader that conforms
485 with MIME as defined in this document should treat a message that
486 might arrive in the future with some value of MIME-Version other than
489 It is also worth noting that version control for specific media types
490 is not accomplished using the MIME-Version mechanism. In particular,
491 some formats (such as application/postscript) have version numbering
492 conventions that are internal to the media format. Where such
493 conventions exist, MIME does nothing to supersede them. Where no
494 such conventions exist, a MIME media type might use a "version"
495 parameter in the content-type field if necessary.
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511 NOTE TO IMPLEMENTORS: When checking MIME-Version values any RFC 822
512 comment strings that are present must be ignored. In particular, the
513 following four MIME-Version fields are equivalent:
517 MIME-Version: 1.0 (produced by MetaSend Vx.x)
519 MIME-Version: (produced by MetaSend Vx.x) 1.0
521 MIME-Version: 1.(produced by MetaSend Vx.x)0
523 In the absence of a MIME-Version field, a receiving mail user agent
524 (whether conforming to MIME requirements or not) may optionally
525 choose to interpret the body of the message according to local
526 conventions. Many such conventions are currently in use and it
527 should be noted that in practice non-MIME messages can contain just
530 It is impossible to be certain that a non-MIME mail message is
531 actually plain text in the US-ASCII character set since it might well
532 be a message that, using some set of nonstandard local conventions
533 that predate MIME, includes text in another character set or non-
534 textual data presented in a manner that cannot be automatically
535 recognized (e.g., a uuencoded compressed UNIX tar file).
5375. Content-Type Header Field
539 The purpose of the Content-Type field is to describe the data
540 contained in the body fully enough that the receiving user agent can
541 pick an appropriate agent or mechanism to present the data to the
542 user, or otherwise deal with the data in an appropriate manner. The
543 value in this field is called a media type.
545 HISTORICAL NOTE: The Content-Type header field was first defined in
546 RFC 1049. RFC 1049 used a simpler and less powerful syntax, but one
547 that is largely compatible with the mechanism given here.
549 The Content-Type header field specifies the nature of the data in the
550 body of an entity by giving media type and subtype identifiers, and
551 by providing auxiliary information that may be required for certain
552 media types. After the media type and subtype names, the remainder
553 of the header field is simply a set of parameters, specified in an
554 attribute=value notation. The ordering of parameters is not
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564RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
567 In general, the top-level media type is used to declare the general
568 type of data, while the subtype specifies a specific format for that
569 type of data. Thus, a media type of "image/xyz" is enough to tell a
570 user agent that the data is an image, even if the user agent has no
571 knowledge of the specific image format "xyz". Such information can
572 be used, for example, to decide whether or not to show a user the raw
573 data from an unrecognized subtype -- such an action might be
574 reasonable for unrecognized subtypes of text, but not for
575 unrecognized subtypes of image or audio. For this reason, registered
576 subtypes of text, image, audio, and video should not contain embedded
577 information that is really of a different type. Such compound
578 formats should be represented using the "multipart" or "application"
581 Parameters are modifiers of the media subtype, and as such do not
582 fundamentally affect the nature of the content. The set of
583 meaningful parameters depends on the media type and subtype. Most
584 parameters are associated with a single specific subtype. However, a
585 given top-level media type may define parameters which are applicable
586 to any subtype of that type. Parameters may be required by their
587 defining content type or subtype or they may be optional. MIME
588 implementations must ignore any parameters whose names they do not
591 For example, the "charset" parameter is applicable to any subtype of
592 "text", while the "boundary" parameter is required for any subtype of
593 the "multipart" media type.
595 There are NO globally-meaningful parameters that apply to all media
596 types. Truly global mechanisms are best addressed, in the MIME
597 model, by the definition of additional Content-* header fields.
599 An initial set of seven top-level media types is defined in RFC 2046.
600 Five of these are discrete types whose content is essentially opaque
601 as far as MIME processing is concerned. The remaining two are
602 composite types whose contents require additional handling by MIME
605 This set of top-level media types is intended to be substantially
606 complete. It is expected that additions to the larger set of
607 supported types can generally be accomplished by the creation of new
608 subtypes of these initial types. In the future, more top-level types
609 may be defined only by a standards-track extension to this standard.
610 If another top-level type is to be used for any reason, it must be
611 given a name starting with "X-" to indicate its non-standard status
612 and to avoid a potential conflict with a future official name.
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6235.1. Syntax of the Content-Type Header Field
625 In the Augmented BNF notation of RFC 822, a Content-Type header field
626 value is defined as follows:
630 ; Matching of media type and subtype
631 ; is ALWAYS case-insensitive.
633 type := discrete-type / composite-type
635 discrete-type := "text" / "image" / "audio" / "video" /
636 "application" / extension-token
638 composite-type := "message" / "multipart" / extension-token
640 extension-token := ietf-token / x-token
642 ietf-token := <An extension token defined by a
643 standards-track RFC and registered
646 x-token := <The two characters "X-" or "x-" followed, with
647 no intervening white space, by any token>
649 subtype := extension-token / iana-token
651 iana-token := <A publicly-defined extension token. Tokens
652 of this form must be registered with IANA
653 as specified in RFC 2048.>
655 parameter := attribute "=" value
658 ; Matching of attributes
659 ; is ALWAYS case-insensitive.
666 tspecials := "(" / ")" / "<" / ">" / "@" /
667 "," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <">
668 "/" / "[" / "]" / "?" / "="
669 ; Must be in quoted-string,
670 ; to use within parameter values
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679 Note that the definition of "tspecials" is the same as the RFC 822
680 definition of "specials" with the addition of the three characters
681 "/", "?", and "=", and the removal of ".".
683 Note also that a subtype specification is MANDATORY -- it may not be
684 omitted from a Content-Type header field. As such, there are no
687 The type, subtype, and parameter names are not case sensitive. For
688 example, TEXT, Text, and TeXt are all equivalent top-level media
689 types. Parameter values are normally case sensitive, but sometimes
690 are interpreted in a case-insensitive fashion, depending on the
691 intended use. (For example, multipart boundaries are case-sensitive,
692 but the "access-type" parameter for message/External-body is not
695 Note that the value of a quoted string parameter does not include the
696 quotes. That is, the quotation marks in a quoted-string are not a
697 part of the value of the parameter, but are merely used to delimit
698 that parameter value. In addition, comments are allowed in
699 accordance with RFC 822 rules for structured header fields. Thus the
702 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii (Plain text)
704 Content-type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
706 are completely equivalent.
708 Beyond this syntax, the only syntactic constraint on the definition
709 of subtype names is the desire that their uses must not conflict.
710 That is, it would be undesirable to have two different communities
711 using "Content-Type: application/foobar" to mean two different
712 things. The process of defining new media subtypes, then, is not
713 intended to be a mechanism for imposing restrictions, but simply a
714 mechanism for publicizing their definition and usage. There are,
715 therefore, two acceptable mechanisms for defining new media subtypes:
717 (1) Private values (starting with "X-") may be defined
718 bilaterally between two cooperating agents without
719 outside registration or standardization. Such values
720 cannot be registered or standardized.
722 (2) New standard values should be registered with IANA as
723 described in RFC 2048.
725 The second document in this set, RFC 2046, defines the initial set of
726 media types for MIME.
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7355.2. Content-Type Defaults
737 Default RFC 822 messages without a MIME Content-Type header are taken
738 by this protocol to be plain text in the US-ASCII character set,
739 which can be explicitly specified as:
741 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
743 This default is assumed if no Content-Type header field is specified.
744 It is also recommend that this default be assumed when a
745 syntactically invalid Content-Type header field is encountered. In
746 the presence of a MIME-Version header field and the absence of any
747 Content-Type header field, a receiving User Agent can also assume
748 that plain US-ASCII text was the sender's intent. Plain US-ASCII
749 text may still be assumed in the absence of a MIME-Version or the
750 presence of an syntactically invalid Content-Type header field, but
751 the sender's intent might have been otherwise.
7536. Content-Transfer-Encoding Header Field
755 Many media types which could be usefully transported via email are
756 represented, in their "natural" format, as 8bit character or binary
757 data. Such data cannot be transmitted over some transfer protocols.
758 For example, RFC 821 (SMTP) restricts mail messages to 7bit US-ASCII
759 data with lines no longer than 1000 characters including any trailing
762 It is necessary, therefore, to define a standard mechanism for
763 encoding such data into a 7bit short line format. Proper labelling
764 of unencoded material in less restrictive formats for direct use over
765 less restrictive transports is also desireable. This document
766 specifies that such encodings will be indicated by a new "Content-
767 Transfer-Encoding" header field. This field has not been defined by
768 any previous standard.
7706.1. Content-Transfer-Encoding Syntax
772 The Content-Transfer-Encoding field's value is a single token
773 specifying the type of encoding, as enumerated below. Formally:
777 mechanism := "7bit" / "8bit" / "binary" /
778 "quoted-printable" / "base64" /
781 These values are not case sensitive -- Base64 and BASE64 and bAsE64
782 are all equivalent. An encoding type of 7BIT requires that the body
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791 is already in a 7bit mail-ready representation. This is the default
792 value -- that is, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT" is assumed if the
793 Content-Transfer-Encoding header field is not present.
7956.2. Content-Transfer-Encodings Semantics
797 This single Content-Transfer-Encoding token actually provides two
798 pieces of information. It specifies what sort of encoding
799 transformation the body was subjected to and hence what decoding
800 operation must be used to restore it to its original form, and it
801 specifies what the domain of the result is.
803 The transformation part of any Content-Transfer-Encodings specifies,
804 either explicitly or implicitly, a single, well-defined decoding
805 algorithm, which for any sequence of encoded octets either transforms
806 it to the original sequence of octets which was encoded, or shows
807 that it is illegal as an encoded sequence. Content-Transfer-
808 Encodings transformations never depend on any additional external
809 profile information for proper operation. Note that while decoders
810 must produce a single, well-defined output for a valid encoding no
811 such restrictions exist for encoders: Encoding a given sequence of
812 octets to different, equivalent encoded sequences is perfectly legal.
814 Three transformations are currently defined: identity, the "quoted-
815 printable" encoding, and the "base64" encoding. The domains are
816 "binary", "8bit" and "7bit".
818 The Content-Transfer-Encoding values "7bit", "8bit", and "binary" all
819 mean that the identity (i.e. NO) encoding transformation has been
820 performed. As such, they serve simply as indicators of the domain of
821 the body data, and provide useful information about the sort of
822 encoding that might be needed for transmission in a given transport
823 system. The terms "7bit data", "8bit data", and "binary data" are
824 all defined in Section 2.
826 The quoted-printable and base64 encodings transform their input from
827 an arbitrary domain into material in the "7bit" range, thus making it
828 safe to carry over restricted transports. The specific definition of
829 the transformations are given below.
831 The proper Content-Transfer-Encoding label must always be used.
832 Labelling unencoded data containing 8bit characters as "7bit" is not
833 allowed, nor is labelling unencoded non-line-oriented data as
834 anything other than "binary" allowed.
836 Unlike media subtypes, a proliferation of Content-Transfer-Encoding
837 values is both undesirable and unnecessary. However, establishing
838 only a single transformation into the "7bit" domain does not seem
842Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 15]
844RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
847 possible. There is a tradeoff between the desire for a compact and
848 efficient encoding of largely- binary data and the desire for a
849 somewhat readable encoding of data that is mostly, but not entirely,
850 7bit. For this reason, at least two encoding mechanisms are
851 necessary: a more or less readable encoding (quoted-printable) and a
852 "dense" or "uniform" encoding (base64).
854 Mail transport for unencoded 8bit data is defined in RFC 1652. As of
855 the initial publication of this document, there are no standardized
856 Internet mail transports for which it is legitimate to include
857 unencoded binary data in mail bodies. Thus there are no
858 circumstances in which the "binary" Content-Transfer-Encoding is
859 actually valid in Internet mail. However, in the event that binary
860 mail transport becomes a reality in Internet mail, or when MIME is
861 used in conjunction with any other binary-capable mail transport
862 mechanism, binary bodies must be labelled as such using this
865 NOTE: The five values defined for the Content-Transfer-Encoding field
866 imply nothing about the media type other than the algorithm by which
867 it was encoded or the transport system requirements if unencoded.
8696.3. New Content-Transfer-Encodings
871 Implementors may, if necessary, define private Content-Transfer-
872 Encoding values, but must use an x-token, which is a name prefixed by
873 "X-", to indicate its non-standard status, e.g., "Content-Transfer-
874 Encoding: x-my-new-encoding". Additional standardized Content-
875 Transfer-Encoding values must be specified by a standards-track RFC.
876 The requirements such specifications must meet are given in RFC 2048.
877 As such, all content-transfer-encoding namespace except that
878 beginning with "X-" is explicitly reserved to the IETF for future
881 Unlike media types and subtypes, the creation of new Content-
882 Transfer-Encoding values is STRONGLY discouraged, as it seems likely
883 to hinder interoperability with little potential benefit
8856.4. Interpretation and Use
887 If a Content-Transfer-Encoding header field appears as part of a
888 message header, it applies to the entire body of that message. If a
889 Content-Transfer-Encoding header field appears as part of an entity's
890 headers, it applies only to the body of that entity. If an entity is
891 of type "multipart" the Content-Transfer-Encoding is not permitted to
892 have any value other than "7bit", "8bit" or "binary". Even more
893 severe restrictions apply to some subtypes of the "message" type.
898Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 16]
900RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
903 It should be noted that most media types are defined in terms of
904 octets rather than bits, so that the mechanisms described here are
905 mechanisms for encoding arbitrary octet streams, not bit streams. If
906 a bit stream is to be encoded via one of these mechanisms, it must
907 first be converted to an 8bit byte stream using the network standard
908 bit order ("big-endian"), in which the earlier bits in a stream
909 become the higher-order bits in a 8bit byte. A bit stream not ending
910 at an 8bit boundary must be padded with zeroes. RFC 2046 provides a
911 mechanism for noting the addition of such padding in the case of the
912 application/octet-stream media type, which has a "padding" parameter.
914 The encoding mechanisms defined here explicitly encode all data in
915 US-ASCII. Thus, for example, suppose an entity has header fields
918 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
919 Content-transfer-encoding: base64
921 This must be interpreted to mean that the body is a base64 US-ASCII
922 encoding of data that was originally in ISO-8859-1, and will be in
923 that character set again after decoding.
925 Certain Content-Transfer-Encoding values may only be used on certain
926 media types. In particular, it is EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN to use any
927 encodings other than "7bit", "8bit", or "binary" with any composite
928 media type, i.e. one that recursively includes other Content-Type
929 fields. Currently the only composite media types are "multipart" and
930 "message". All encodings that are desired for bodies of type
931 multipart or message must be done at the innermost level, by encoding
932 the actual body that needs to be encoded.
934 It should also be noted that, by definition, if a composite entity
935 has a transfer-encoding value such as "7bit", but one of the enclosed
936 entities has a less restrictive value such as "8bit", then either the
937 outer "7bit" labelling is in error, because 8bit data are included,
938 or the inner "8bit" labelling placed an unnecessarily high demand on
939 the transport system because the actual included data were actually
942 NOTE ON ENCODING RESTRICTIONS: Though the prohibition against using
943 content-transfer-encodings on composite body data may seem overly
944 restrictive, it is necessary to prevent nested encodings, in which
945 data are passed through an encoding algorithm multiple times, and
946 must be decoded multiple times in order to be properly viewed.
947 Nested encodings add considerable complexity to user agents: Aside
948 from the obvious efficiency problems with such multiple encodings,
949 they can obscure the basic structure of a message. In particular,
950 they can imply that several decoding operations are necessary simply
954Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 17]
956RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
959 to find out what types of bodies a message contains. Banning nested
960 encodings may complicate the job of certain mail gateways, but this
961 seems less of a problem than the effect of nested encodings on user
964 Any entity with an unrecognized Content-Transfer-Encoding must be
965 treated as if it has a Content-Type of "application/octet-stream",
966 regardless of what the Content-Type header field actually says.
968 NOTE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONTENT-TYPE AND CONTENT-TRANSFER-
969 ENCODING: It may seem that the Content-Transfer-Encoding could be
970 inferred from the characteristics of the media that is to be encoded,
971 or, at the very least, that certain Content-Transfer-Encodings could
972 be mandated for use with specific media types. There are several
973 reasons why this is not the case. First, given the varying types of
974 transports used for mail, some encodings may be appropriate for some
975 combinations of media types and transports but not for others. (For
976 example, in an 8bit transport, no encoding would be required for text
977 in certain character sets, while such encodings are clearly required
980 Second, certain media types may require different types of transfer
981 encoding under different circumstances. For example, many PostScript
982 bodies might consist entirely of short lines of 7bit data and hence
983 require no encoding at all. Other PostScript bodies (especially
984 those using Level 2 PostScript's binary encoding mechanism) may only
985 be reasonably represented using a binary transport encoding.
986 Finally, since the Content-Type field is intended to be an open-ended
987 specification mechanism, strict specification of an association
988 between media types and encodings effectively couples the
989 specification of an application protocol with a specific lower-level
990 transport. This is not desirable since the developers of a media
991 type should not have to be aware of all the transports in use and
992 what their limitations are.
9946.5. Translating Encodings
996 The quoted-printable and base64 encodings are designed so that
997 conversion between them is possible. The only issue that arises in
998 such a conversion is the handling of hard line breaks in quoted-
999 printable encoding output. When converting from quoted-printable to
1000 base64 a hard line break in the quoted-printable form represents a
1001 CRLF sequence in the canonical form of the data. It must therefore be
1002 converted to a corresponding encoded CRLF in the base64 form of the
1003 data. Similarly, a CRLF sequence in the canonical form of the data
1004 obtained after base64 decoding must be converted to a quoted-
1005 printable hard line break, but ONLY when converting text data.
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1012RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
10156.6. Canonical Encoding Model
1017 There was some confusion, in the previous versions of this RFC,
1018 regarding the model for when email data was to be converted to
1019 canonical form and encoded, and in particular how this process would
1020 affect the treatment of CRLFs, given that the representation of
1021 newlines varies greatly from system to system, and the relationship
1022 between content-transfer-encodings and character sets. A canonical
1023 model for encoding is presented in RFC 2049 for this reason.
1027 The Quoted-Printable encoding is intended to represent data that
1028 largely consists of octets that correspond to printable characters in
1029 the US-ASCII character set. It encodes the data in such a way that
1030 the resulting octets are unlikely to be modified by mail transport.
1031 If the data being encoded are mostly US-ASCII text, the encoded form
1032 of the data remains largely recognizable by humans. A body which is
1033 entirely US-ASCII may also be encoded in Quoted-Printable to ensure
1034 the integrity of the data should the message pass through a
1035 character-translating, and/or line-wrapping gateway.
1037 In this encoding, octets are to be represented as determined by the
1040 (1) (General 8bit representation) Any octet, except a CR or
1041 LF that is part of a CRLF line break of the canonical
1042 (standard) form of the data being encoded, may be
1043 represented by an "=" followed by a two digit
1044 hexadecimal representation of the octet's value. The
1045 digits of the hexadecimal alphabet, for this purpose,
1046 are "0123456789ABCDEF". Uppercase letters must be
1047 used; lowercase letters are not allowed. Thus, for
1048 example, the decimal value 12 (US-ASCII form feed) can
1049 be represented by "=0C", and the decimal value 61 (US-
1050 ASCII EQUAL SIGN) can be represented by "=3D". This
1051 rule must be followed except when the following rules
1052 allow an alternative encoding.
1054 (2) (Literal representation) Octets with decimal values of
1055 33 through 60 inclusive, and 62 through 126, inclusive,
1056 MAY be represented as the US-ASCII characters which
1057 correspond to those octets (EXCLAMATION POINT through
1058 LESS THAN, and GREATER THAN through TILDE,
1061 (3) (White Space) Octets with values of 9 and 32 MAY be
1062 represented as US-ASCII TAB (HT) and SPACE characters,
1066Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 19]
1068RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
1071 respectively, but MUST NOT be so represented at the end
1072 of an encoded line. Any TAB (HT) or SPACE characters
1073 on an encoded line MUST thus be followed on that line
1074 by a printable character. In particular, an "=" at the
1075 end of an encoded line, indicating a soft line break
1076 (see rule #5) may follow one or more TAB (HT) or SPACE
1077 characters. It follows that an octet with decimal
1078 value 9 or 32 appearing at the end of an encoded line
1079 must be represented according to Rule #1. This rule is
1080 necessary because some MTAs (Message Transport Agents,
1081 programs which transport messages from one user to
1082 another, or perform a portion of such transfers) are
1083 known to pad lines of text with SPACEs, and others are
1084 known to remove "white space" characters from the end
1085 of a line. Therefore, when decoding a Quoted-Printable
1086 body, any trailing white space on a line must be
1087 deleted, as it will necessarily have been added by
1088 intermediate transport agents.
1090 (4) (Line Breaks) A line break in a text body, represented
1091 as a CRLF sequence in the text canonical form, must be
1092 represented by a (RFC 822) line break, which is also a
1093 CRLF sequence, in the Quoted-Printable encoding. Since
1094 the canonical representation of media types other than
1095 text do not generally include the representation of
1096 line breaks as CRLF sequences, no hard line breaks
1097 (i.e. line breaks that are intended to be meaningful
1098 and to be displayed to the user) can occur in the
1099 quoted-printable encoding of such types. Sequences
1100 like "=0D", "=0A", "=0A=0D" and "=0D=0A" will routinely
1101 appear in non-text data represented in quoted-
1102 printable, of course.
1104 Note that many implementations may elect to encode the
1105 local representation of various content types directly
1106 rather than converting to canonical form first,
1107 encoding, and then converting back to local
1108 representation. In particular, this may apply to plain
1109 text material on systems that use newline conventions
1110 other than a CRLF terminator sequence. Such an
1111 implementation optimization is permissible, but only
1112 when the combined canonicalization-encoding step is
1113 equivalent to performing the three steps separately.
1115 (5) (Soft Line Breaks) The Quoted-Printable encoding
1116 REQUIRES that encoded lines be no more than 76
1117 characters long. If longer lines are to be encoded
1118 with the Quoted-Printable encoding, "soft" line breaks
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1124RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
1127 must be used. An equal sign as the last character on a
1128 encoded line indicates such a non-significant ("soft")
1129 line break in the encoded text.
1131 Thus if the "raw" form of the line is a single unencoded line that
1134 Now's the time for all folk to come to the aid of their country.
1136 This can be represented, in the Quoted-Printable encoding, as:
1139 for all folk to come=
1140 to the aid of their country.
1142 This provides a mechanism with which long lines are encoded in such a
1143 way as to be restored by the user agent. The 76 character limit does
1144 not count the trailing CRLF, but counts all other characters,
1145 including any equal signs.
1147 Since the hyphen character ("-") may be represented as itself in the
1148 Quoted-Printable encoding, care must be taken, when encapsulating a
1149 quoted-printable encoded body inside one or more multipart entities,
1150 to ensure that the boundary delimiter does not appear anywhere in the
1151 encoded body. (A good strategy is to choose a boundary that includes
1152 a character sequence such as "=_" which can never appear in a
1153 quoted-printable body. See the definition of multipart messages in
1156 NOTE: The quoted-printable encoding represents something of a
1157 compromise between readability and reliability in transport. Bodies
1158 encoded with the quoted-printable encoding will work reliably over
1159 most mail gateways, but may not work perfectly over a few gateways,
1160 notably those involving translation into EBCDIC. A higher level of
1161 confidence is offered by the base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding. A way
1162 to get reasonably reliable transport through EBCDIC gateways is to
1163 also quote the US-ASCII characters
1167 according to rule #1.
1169 Because quoted-printable data is generally assumed to be line-
1170 oriented, it is to be expected that the representation of the breaks
1171 between the lines of quoted-printable data may be altered in
1172 transport, in the same manner that plain text mail has always been
1173 altered in Internet mail when passing between systems with differing
1174 newline conventions. If such alterations are likely to constitute a
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1180RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
1183 corruption of the data, it is probably more sensible to use the
1184 base64 encoding rather than the quoted-printable encoding.
1186 NOTE: Several kinds of substrings cannot be generated according to
1187 the encoding rules for the quoted-printable content-transfer-
1188 encoding, and hence are formally illegal if they appear in the output
1189 of a quoted-printable encoder. This note enumerates these cases and
1190 suggests ways to handle such illegal substrings if any are
1191 encountered in quoted-printable data that is to be decoded.
1193 (1) An "=" followed by two hexadecimal digits, one or both
1194 of which are lowercase letters in "abcdef", is formally
1195 illegal. A robust implementation might choose to
1196 recognize them as the corresponding uppercase letters.
1198 (2) An "=" followed by a character that is neither a
1199 hexadecimal digit (including "abcdef") nor the CR
1200 character of a CRLF pair is illegal. This case can be
1201 the result of US-ASCII text having been included in a
1202 quoted-printable part of a message without itself
1203 having been subjected to quoted-printable encoding. A
1204 reasonable approach by a robust implementation might be
1205 to include the "=" character and the following
1206 character in the decoded data without any
1207 transformation and, if possible, indicate to the user
1208 that proper decoding was not possible at this point in
1211 (3) An "=" cannot be the ultimate or penultimate character
1212 in an encoded object. This could be handled as in case
1215 (4) Control characters other than TAB, or CR and LF as
1216 parts of CRLF pairs, must not appear. The same is true
1217 for octets with decimal values greater than 126. If
1218 found in incoming quoted-printable data by a decoder, a
1219 robust implementation might exclude them from the
1220 decoded data and warn the user that illegal characters
1223 (5) Encoded lines must not be longer than 76 characters,
1224 not counting the trailing CRLF. If longer lines are
1225 found in incoming, encoded data, a robust
1226 implementation might nevertheless decode the lines, and
1227 might report the erroneous encoding to the user.
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1236RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
1239 WARNING TO IMPLEMENTORS: If binary data is encoded in quoted-
1240 printable, care must be taken to encode CR and LF characters as "=0D"
1241 and "=0A", respectively. In particular, a CRLF sequence in binary
1242 data should be encoded as "=0D=0A". Otherwise, if CRLF were
1243 represented as a hard line break, it might be incorrectly decoded on
1244 platforms with different line break conventions.
1246 For formalists, the syntax of quoted-printable data is described by
1247 the following grammar:
1249 quoted-printable := qp-line *(CRLF qp-line)
1251 qp-line := *(qp-segment transport-padding CRLF)
1252 qp-part transport-padding
1254 qp-part := qp-section
1255 ; Maximum length of 76 characters
1257 qp-segment := qp-section *(SPACE / TAB) "="
1258 ; Maximum length of 76 characters
1262 ptext := hex-octet / safe-char
1264 safe-char := <any octet with decimal value of 33 through
1265 60 inclusive, and 62 through 126>
1266 ; Characters not listed as "mail-safe" in
1267 ; RFC 2049 are also not recommended.
1269 hex-octet := "=" 2(DIGIT / "A" / "B" / "C" / "D" / "E" / "F")
1270 ; Octet must be used for characters > 127, =,
1271 ; SPACEs or TABs at the ends of lines, and is
1272 ; recommended for any character not listed in
1273 ; RFC 2049 as "mail-safe".
1275 transport-padding := *LWSP-char
1276 ; Composers MUST NOT generate
1277 ; non-zero length transport
1278 ; padding, but receivers MUST
1279 ; be able to handle padding
1280 ; added by message transports.
1282 IMPORTANT: The addition of LWSP between the elements shown in this
1283 BNF is NOT allowed since this BNF does not specify a structured
1290Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 23]
1292RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
12956.8. Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding
1297 The Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding is designed to represent
1298 arbitrary sequences of octets in a form that need not be humanly
1299 readable. The encoding and decoding algorithms are simple, but the
1300 encoded data are consistently only about 33 percent larger than the
1301 unencoded data. This encoding is virtually identical to the one used
1302 in Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) applications, as defined in RFC 1421.
1304 A 65-character subset of US-ASCII is used, enabling 6 bits to be
1305 represented per printable character. (The extra 65th character, "=",
1306 is used to signify a special processing function.)
1308 NOTE: This subset has the important property that it is represented
1309 identically in all versions of ISO 646, including US-ASCII, and all
1310 characters in the subset are also represented identically in all
1311 versions of EBCDIC. Other popular encodings, such as the encoding
1312 used by the uuencode utility, Macintosh binhex 4.0 [RFC-1741], and
1313 the base85 encoding specified as part of Level 2 PostScript, do not
1314 share these properties, and thus do not fulfill the portability
1315 requirements a binary transport encoding for mail must meet.
1317 The encoding process represents 24-bit groups of input bits as output
1318 strings of 4 encoded characters. Proceeding from left to right, a
1319 24-bit input group is formed by concatenating 3 8bit input groups.
1320 These 24 bits are then treated as 4 concatenated 6-bit groups, each
1321 of which is translated into a single digit in the base64 alphabet.
1322 When encoding a bit stream via the base64 encoding, the bit stream
1323 must be presumed to be ordered with the most-significant-bit first.
1324 That is, the first bit in the stream will be the high-order bit in
1325 the first 8bit byte, and the eighth bit will be the low-order bit in
1326 the first 8bit byte, and so on.
1328 Each 6-bit group is used as an index into an array of 64 printable
1329 characters. The character referenced by the index is placed in the
1330 output string. These characters, identified in Table 1, below, are
1331 selected so as to be universally representable, and the set excludes
1332 characters with particular significance to SMTP (e.g., ".", CR, LF)
1333 and to the multipart boundary delimiters defined in RFC 2046 (e.g.,
1346Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 24]
1348RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
1351 Table 1: The Base64 Alphabet
1353 Value Encoding Value Encoding Value Encoding Value Encoding
1368 14 O 31 f 48 w (pad) =
1372 The encoded output stream must be represented in lines of no more
1373 than 76 characters each. All line breaks or other characters not
1374 found in Table 1 must be ignored by decoding software. In base64
1375 data, characters other than those in Table 1, line breaks, and other
1376 white space probably indicate a transmission error, about which a
1377 warning message or even a message rejection might be appropriate
1378 under some circumstances.
1380 Special processing is performed if fewer than 24 bits are available
1381 at the end of the data being encoded. A full encoding quantum is
1382 always completed at the end of a body. When fewer than 24 input bits
1383 are available in an input group, zero bits are added (on the right)
1384 to form an integral number of 6-bit groups. Padding at the end of
1385 the data is performed using the "=" character. Since all base64
1386 input is an integral number of octets, only the following cases can
1387 arise: (1) the final quantum of encoding input is an integral
1388 multiple of 24 bits; here, the final unit of encoded output will be
1389 an integral multiple of 4 characters with no "=" padding, (2) the
1390 final quantum of encoding input is exactly 8 bits; here, the final
1391 unit of encoded output will be two characters followed by two "="
1392 padding characters, or (3) the final quantum of encoding input is
1393 exactly 16 bits; here, the final unit of encoded output will be three
1394 characters followed by one "=" padding character.
1396 Because it is used only for padding at the end of the data, the
1397 occurrence of any "=" characters may be taken as evidence that the
1398 end of the data has been reached (without truncation in transit). No
1402Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 25]
1404RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
1407 such assurance is possible, however, when the number of octets
1408 transmitted was a multiple of three and no "=" characters are
1411 Any characters outside of the base64 alphabet are to be ignored in
1412 base64-encoded data.
1414 Care must be taken to use the proper octets for line breaks if base64
1415 encoding is applied directly to text material that has not been
1416 converted to canonical form. In particular, text line breaks must be
1417 converted into CRLF sequences prior to base64 encoding. The
1418 important thing to note is that this may be done directly by the
1419 encoder rather than in a prior canonicalization step in some
1422 NOTE: There is no need to worry about quoting potential boundary
1423 delimiters within base64-encoded bodies within multipart entities
1424 because no hyphen characters are used in the base64 encoding.
14267. Content-ID Header Field
1428 In constructing a high-level user agent, it may be desirable to allow
1429 one body to make reference to another. Accordingly, bodies may be
1430 labelled using the "Content-ID" header field, which is syntactically
1431 identical to the "Message-ID" header field:
1433 id := "Content-ID" ":" msg-id
1435 Like the Message-ID values, Content-ID values must be generated to be
1438 The Content-ID value may be used for uniquely identifying MIME
1439 entities in several contexts, particularly for caching data
1440 referenced by the message/external-body mechanism. Although the
1441 Content-ID header is generally optional, its use is MANDATORY in
1442 implementations which generate data of the optional MIME media type
1443 "message/external-body". That is, each message/external-body entity
1444 must have a Content-ID field to permit caching of such data.
1446 It is also worth noting that the Content-ID value has special
1447 semantics in the case of the multipart/alternative media type. This
1448 is explained in the section of RFC 2046 dealing with
1449 multipart/alternative.
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1460RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
14638. Content-Description Header Field
1465 The ability to associate some descriptive information with a given
1466 body is often desirable. For example, it may be useful to mark an
1467 "image" body as "a picture of the Space Shuttle Endeavor." Such text
1468 may be placed in the Content-Description header field. This header
1469 field is always optional.
1471 description := "Content-Description" ":" *text
1473 The description is presumed to be given in the US-ASCII character
1474 set, although the mechanism specified in RFC 2047 may be used for
1475 non-US-ASCII Content-Description values.
14779. Additional MIME Header Fields
1479 Future documents may elect to define additional MIME header fields
1480 for various purposes. Any new header field that further describes
1481 the content of a message should begin with the string "Content-" to
1482 allow such fields which appear in a message header to be
1483 distinguished from ordinary RFC 822 message header fields.
1485 MIME-extension-field := <Any RFC 822 header field which
1486 begins with the string
1491 Using the MIME-Version, Content-Type, and Content-Transfer-Encoding
1492 header fields, it is possible to include, in a standardized way,
1493 arbitrary types of data with RFC 822 conformant mail messages. No
1494 restrictions imposed by either RFC 821 or RFC 822 are violated, and
1495 care has been taken to avoid problems caused by additional
1496 restrictions imposed by the characteristics of some Internet mail
1497 transport mechanisms (see RFC 2049).
1499 The next document in this set, RFC 2046, specifies the initial set of
1500 media types that can be labelled and transported using these headers.
150211. Security Considerations
1504 Security issues are discussed in the second document in this set, RFC
1514Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 27]
1516RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
151912. Authors' Addresses
1521 For more information, the authors of this document are best contacted
1525 Innosoft International, Inc.
1526 1050 East Garvey Avenue South
1527 West Covina, CA 91790
1530 Phone: +1 818 919 3600
1531 Fax: +1 818 919 3614
1532 EMail: ned@innosoft.com
1535 Nathaniel S. Borenstein
1536 First Virtual Holdings
1537 25 Washington Avenue
1538 Morristown, NJ 07960
1541 Phone: +1 201 540 8967
1542 Fax: +1 201 993 3032
1543 EMail: nsb@nsb.fv.com
1546 MIME is a result of the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force
1547 Working Group on RFC 822 Extensions. The chairman of that group,
1548 Greg Vaudreuil, may be reached at:
1550 Gregory M. Vaudreuil
1551 Octel Network Services
1552 17080 Dallas Parkway
1553 Dallas, TX 75248-1905
1556 EMail: Greg.Vaudreuil@Octel.Com
1570Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 28]
1572RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
1575Appendix A -- Collected Grammar
1577 This appendix contains the complete BNF grammar for all the syntax
1578 specified by this document.
1580 By itself, however, this grammar is incomplete. It refers by name to
1581 several syntax rules that are defined by RFC 822. Rather than
1582 reproduce those definitions here, and risk unintentional differences
1583 between the two, this document simply refers the reader to RFC 822
1584 for the remaining definitions. Wherever a term is undefined, it
1585 refers to the RFC 822 definition.
1588 ; Matching of attributes
1589 ; is ALWAYS case-insensitive.
1591 composite-type := "message" / "multipart" / extension-token
1593 content := "Content-Type" ":" type "/" subtype
1595 ; Matching of media type and subtype
1596 ; is ALWAYS case-insensitive.
1598 description := "Content-Description" ":" *text
1600 discrete-type := "text" / "image" / "audio" / "video" /
1601 "application" / extension-token
1603 encoding := "Content-Transfer-Encoding" ":" mechanism
1605 entity-headers := [ content CRLF ]
1608 [ description CRLF ]
1609 *( MIME-extension-field CRLF )
1611 extension-token := ietf-token / x-token
1613 hex-octet := "=" 2(DIGIT / "A" / "B" / "C" / "D" / "E" / "F")
1614 ; Octet must be used for characters > 127, =,
1615 ; SPACEs or TABs at the ends of lines, and is
1616 ; recommended for any character not listed in
1617 ; RFC 2049 as "mail-safe".
1619 iana-token := <A publicly-defined extension token. Tokens
1620 of this form must be registered with IANA
1621 as specified in RFC 2048.>
1626Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 29]
1628RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
1631 ietf-token := <An extension token defined by a
1632 standards-track RFC and registered
1635 id := "Content-ID" ":" msg-id
1637 mechanism := "7bit" / "8bit" / "binary" /
1638 "quoted-printable" / "base64" /
1639 ietf-token / x-token
1641 MIME-extension-field := <Any RFC 822 header field which
1642 begins with the string
1648 ; The ordering of the header
1649 ; fields implied by this BNF
1650 ; definition should be ignored.
1654 ; Any field not beginning with
1655 ; "content-" can have no defined
1656 ; meaning and may be ignored.
1657 ; The ordering of the header
1658 ; fields implied by this BNF
1659 ; definition should be ignored.
1661 parameter := attribute "=" value
1663 ptext := hex-octet / safe-char
1665 qp-line := *(qp-segment transport-padding CRLF)
1666 qp-part transport-padding
1668 qp-part := qp-section
1669 ; Maximum length of 76 characters
1671 qp-section := [*(ptext / SPACE / TAB) ptext]
1673 qp-segment := qp-section *(SPACE / TAB) "="
1674 ; Maximum length of 76 characters
1676 quoted-printable := qp-line *(CRLF qp-line)
1682Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 30]
1684RFC 2045 Internet Message Bodies November 1996
1687 safe-char := <any octet with decimal value of 33 through
1688 60 inclusive, and 62 through 126>
1689 ; Characters not listed as "mail-safe" in
1690 ; RFC 2049 are also not recommended.
1692 subtype := extension-token / iana-token
1694 token := 1*<any (US-ASCII) CHAR except SPACE, CTLs,
1697 transport-padding := *LWSP-char
1698 ; Composers MUST NOT generate
1699 ; non-zero length transport
1700 ; padding, but receivers MUST
1701 ; be able to handle padding
1702 ; added by message transports.
1704 tspecials := "(" / ")" / "<" / ">" / "@" /
1705 "," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <">
1706 "/" / "[" / "]" / "?" / "="
1707 ; Must be in quoted-string,
1708 ; to use within parameter values
1710 type := discrete-type / composite-type
1712 value := token / quoted-string
1714 version := "MIME-Version" ":" 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT
1716 x-token := <The two characters "X-" or "x-" followed, with
1717 no intervening white space, by any token>
1738Freed & Borenstein Standards Track [Page 31]