Request for Comments

Date: Jun. 1, 1992
Link: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1341.txt
Source Author or Organization: IETF

This standard defines the concept of "MIME-conformance" as "a certain level of implementation that allows the useful interworking of messages with content that differs from US ASCII text" and specifies the requirements for such conformance.

A mail user agent that is MIME-conformant must generate the appropriate headers and recognize, interpret and process the Content-Type header field and its allowable values.

A message sent from a MIME-conformant user agents is considered to be "safe" because its data won't break or be broken by conformant systems. MIME-conformant user agents are also guaranteed to not display any text to an end user that wasn't intended to be presented.