Mime types

The MIME type definitions help the email client to properly identify the type of the data contained in a message part, and to present this data in the proper format (if possible and supported by the client). If you select an incorrect MIME type for a given message part, the data may often be presented incorrectly by the client, although the data itself are likely not be corrupted.

Mime type names are specified in the following format:

where type is one of the top-level media types, as defined in RFC 2046, such as "text", "image", "audio", "video", and "application". The subtype further identifies the data format–for example "image/jpeg", "image/gif", "application/zip", "application/pdf", and so on.

Some of the most frequently used mime types are listed in the following table:

For a full list of the recognized mime types, please refer to the documentation at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) website, found at the following URL address:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/