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+Network Working Group                                          N. Freed
+Request for Comments: 2045                                     Innosoft
+Obsoletes: 1521, 1522, 1590                               N. Borenstein
+Category: Standards Track                                 First Virtual
+                                                          November 1996
+
+
+                 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
+                            (MIME) Part One:
+                   Format of Internet Message Bodies
+
+Status of this Memo
+
+   This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
+   Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
+   improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
+   Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
+   and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
+
+Abstract
+
+   STD 11, RFC 822, defines a message representation protocol specifying
+   considerable detail about US-ASCII message headers, and leaves the
+   message content, or message body, as flat US-ASCII text.  This set of
+   documents, collectively called the Multipurpose Internet Mail
+   Extensions, or MIME, redefines the format of messages to allow for
+
+    (1)   textual message bodies in character sets other than
+          US-ASCII,
+
+    (2)   an extensible set of different formats for non-textual
+          message bodies,
+
+    (3)   multi-part message bodies, and
+
+    (4)   textual header information in character sets other than
+          US-ASCII.
+
+   These documents are based on earlier work documented in RFC 934, STD
+   11, and RFC 1049, but extends and revises them.  Because RFC 822 said
+   so little about message bodies, these documents are largely
+   orthogonal to (rather than a revision of) RFC 822.
+
+   This initial document specifies the various headers used to describe
+   the structure of MIME messages. The second document, RFC 2046,
+   defines the general structure of the MIME media typing system and
+   defines an initial set of media types. The third document, RFC 2047,
+   describes extensions to RFC 822 to allow non-US-ASCII text data in
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                     [Page 1]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   Internet mail header fields. The fourth document, RFC 2048, specifies
+   various IANA registration procedures for MIME-related facilities. The
+   fifth and final document, RFC 2049, describes MIME conformance
+   criteria as well as providing some illustrative examples of MIME
+   message formats, acknowledgements, and the bibliography.
+
+   These documents are revisions of RFCs 1521, 1522, and 1590, which
+   themselves were revisions of RFCs 1341 and 1342.  An appendix in RFC
+   2049 describes differences and changes from previous versions.
+
+Table of Contents
+
+   1. Introduction .........................................    3
+   2. Definitions, Conventions, and Generic BNF Grammar ....    5
+   2.1 CRLF ................................................    5
+   2.2 Character Set .......................................    6
+   2.3 Message .............................................    6
+   2.4 Entity ..............................................    6
+   2.5 Body Part ...........................................    7
+   2.6 Body ................................................    7
+   2.7 7bit Data ...........................................    7
+   2.8 8bit Data ...........................................    7
+   2.9 Binary Data .........................................    7
+   2.10 Lines ..............................................    7
+   3. MIME Header Fields ...................................    8
+   4. MIME-Version Header Field ............................    8
+   5. Content-Type Header Field ............................   10
+   5.1 Syntax of the Content-Type Header Field .............   12
+   5.2 Content-Type Defaults ...............................   14
+   6. Content-Transfer-Encoding Header Field ...............   14
+   6.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding Syntax ....................   14
+   6.2 Content-Transfer-Encodings Semantics ................   15
+   6.3 New Content-Transfer-Encodings ......................   16
+   6.4 Interpretation and Use ..............................   16
+   6.5 Translating Encodings ...............................   18
+   6.6 Canonical Encoding Model ............................   19
+   6.7 Quoted-Printable Content-Transfer-Encoding ..........   19
+   6.8 Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding ....................   24
+   7. Content-ID Header Field ..............................   26
+   8. Content-Description Header Field .....................   27
+   9. Additional MIME Header Fields ........................   27
+   10. Summary .............................................   27
+   11. Security Considerations .............................   27
+   12. Authors' Addresses ..................................   28
+   A. Collected Grammar ....................................   29
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                     [Page 2]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+1.  Introduction
+
+   Since its publication in 1982, RFC 822 has defined the standard
+   format of textual mail messages on the Internet.  Its success has
+   been such that the RFC 822 format has been adopted, wholly or
+   partially, well beyond the confines of the Internet and the Internet
+   SMTP transport defined by RFC 821.  As the format has seen wider use,
+   a number of limitations have proven increasingly restrictive for the
+   user community.
+
+   RFC 822 was intended to specify a format for text messages.  As such,
+   non-text messages, such as multimedia messages that might include
+   audio or images, are simply not mentioned.  Even in the case of text,
+   however, RFC 822 is inadequate for the needs of mail users whose
+   languages require the use of character sets richer than US-ASCII.
+   Since RFC 822 does not specify mechanisms for mail containing audio,
+   video, Asian language text, or even text in most European languages,
+   additional specifications are needed.
+
+   One of the notable limitations of RFC 821/822 based mail systems is
+   the fact that they limit the contents of electronic mail messages to
+   relatively short lines (e.g. 1000 characters or less [RFC-821]) of
+   7bit US-ASCII.  This forces users to convert any non-textual data
+   that they may wish to send into seven-bit bytes representable as
+   printable US-ASCII characters before invoking a local mail UA (User
+   Agent, a program with which human users send and receive mail).
+   Examples of such encodings currently used in the Internet include
+   pure hexadecimal, uuencode, the 3-in-4 base 64 scheme specified in
+   RFC 1421, the Andrew Toolkit Representation [ATK], and many others.
+
+   The limitations of RFC 822 mail become even more apparent as gateways
+   are designed to allow for the exchange of mail messages between RFC
+   822 hosts and X.400 hosts.  X.400 [X400] specifies mechanisms for the
+   inclusion of non-textual material within electronic mail messages.
+   The current standards for the mapping of X.400 messages to RFC 822
+   messages specify either that X.400 non-textual material must be
+   converted to (not encoded in) IA5Text format, or that they must be
+   discarded, notifying the RFC 822 user that discarding has occurred.
+   This is clearly undesirable, as information that a user may wish to
+   receive is lost.  Even though a user agent may not have the
+   capability of dealing with the non-textual material, the user might
+   have some mechanism external to the UA that can extract useful
+   information from the material.  Moreover, it does not allow for the
+   fact that the message may eventually be gatewayed back into an X.400
+   message handling system (i.e., the X.400 message is "tunneled"
+   through Internet mail), where the non-textual information would
+   definitely become useful again.
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                     [Page 3]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   This document describes several mechanisms that combine to solve most
+   of these problems without introducing any serious incompatibilities
+   with the existing world of RFC 822 mail.  In particular, it
+   describes:
+
+    (1)   A MIME-Version header field, which uses a version
+          number to declare a message to be conformant with MIME
+          and allows mail processing agents to distinguish
+          between such messages and those generated by older or
+          non-conformant software, which are presumed to lack
+          such a field.
+
+    (2)   A Content-Type header field, generalized from RFC 1049,
+          which can be used to specify the media type and subtype
+          of data in the body of a message and to fully specify
+          the native representation (canonical form) of such
+          data.
+
+    (3)   A Content-Transfer-Encoding header field, which can be
+          used to specify both the encoding transformation that
+          was applied to the body and the domain of the result.
+          Encoding transformations other than the identity
+          transformation are usually applied to data in order to
+          allow it to pass through mail transport mechanisms
+          which may have data or character set limitations.
+
+    (4)   Two additional header fields that can be used to
+          further describe the data in a body, the Content-ID and
+          Content-Description header fields.
+
+   All of the header fields defined in this document are subject to the
+   general syntactic rules for header fields specified in RFC 822.  In
+   particular, all of these header fields except for Content-Disposition
+   can include RFC 822 comments, which have no semantic content and
+   should be ignored during MIME processing.
+
+   Finally, to specify and promote interoperability, RFC 2049 provides a
+   basic applicability statement for a subset of the above mechanisms
+   that defines a minimal level of "conformance" with this document.
+
+   HISTORICAL NOTE:  Several of the mechanisms described in this set of
+   documents may seem somewhat strange or even baroque at first reading.
+   It is important to note that compatibility with existing standards
+   AND robustness across existing practice were two of the highest
+   priorities of the working group that developed this set of documents.
+   In particular, compatibility was always favored over elegance.
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                     [Page 4]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official
+   Protocol Standards" for the standardization state and status of this
+   protocol.  RFC 822 and STD 3, RFC 1123 also provide essential
+   background for MIME since no conforming implementation of MIME can
+   violate them.  In addition, several other informational RFC documents
+   will be of interest to the MIME implementor, in particular RFC 1344,
+   RFC 1345, and RFC 1524.
+
+2.  Definitions, Conventions, and Generic BNF Grammar
+
+   Although the mechanisms specified in this set of documents are all
+   described in prose, most are also described formally in the augmented
+   BNF notation of RFC 822. Implementors will need to be familiar with
+   this notation in order to understand this set of documents, and are
+   referred to RFC 822 for a complete explanation of the augmented BNF
+   notation.
+
+   Some of the augmented BNF in this set of documents makes named
+   references to syntax rules defined in RFC 822.  A complete formal
+   grammar, then, is obtained by combining the collected grammar
+   appendices in each document in this set with the BNF of RFC 822 plus
+   the modifications to RFC 822 defined in RFC 1123 (which specifically
+   changes the syntax for `return', `date' and `mailbox').
+
+   All numeric and octet values are given in decimal notation in this
+   set of documents. All media type values, subtype values, and
+   parameter names as defined are case-insensitive.  However, parameter
+   values are case-sensitive unless otherwise specified for the specific
+   parameter.
+
+   FORMATTING NOTE:  Notes, such at this one, provide additional
+   nonessential information which may be skipped by the reader without
+   missing anything essential.  The primary purpose of these non-
+   essential notes is to convey information about the rationale of this
+   set of documents, or to place these documents in the proper
+   historical or evolutionary context.  Such information may in
+   particular be skipped by those who are focused entirely on building a
+   conformant implementation, but may be of use to those who wish to
+   understand why certain design choices were made.
+
+2.1.  CRLF
+
+   The term CRLF, in this set of documents, refers to the sequence of
+   octets corresponding to the two US-ASCII characters CR (decimal value
+   13) and LF (decimal value 10) which, taken together, in this order,
+   denote a line break in RFC 822 mail.
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                     [Page 5]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+2.2.  Character Set
+
+   The term "character set" is used in MIME to refer to a method of
+   converting a sequence of octets into a sequence of characters.  Note
+   that unconditional and unambiguous conversion in the other direction
+   is not required, in that not all characters may be representable by a
+   given character set and a character set may provide more than one
+   sequence of octets to represent a particular sequence of characters.
+
+   This definition is intended to allow various kinds of character
+   encodings, from simple single-table mappings such as US-ASCII to
+   complex table switching methods such as those that use ISO 2022's
+   techniques, to be used as character sets.  However, the definition
+   associated with a MIME character set name must fully specify the
+   mapping to be performed.  In particular, use of external profiling
+   information to determine the exact mapping is not permitted.
+
+   NOTE: The term "character set" was originally to describe such
+   straightforward schemes as US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1 which have a
+   simple one-to-one mapping from single octets to single characters.
+   Multi-octet coded character sets and switching techniques make the
+   situation more complex. For example, some communities use the term
+   "character encoding" for what MIME calls a "character set", while
+   using the phrase "coded character set" to denote an abstract mapping
+   from integers (not octets) to characters.
+
+2.3.  Message
+
+   The term "message", when not further qualified, means either a
+   (complete or "top-level") RFC 822 message being transferred on a
+   network, or a message encapsulated in a body of type "message/rfc822"
+   or "message/partial".
+
+2.4.  Entity
+
+   The term "entity", refers specifically to the MIME-defined header
+   fields and contents of either a message or one of the parts in the
+   body of a multipart entity.  The specification of such entities is
+   the essence of MIME.  Since the contents of an entity are often
+   called the "body", it makes sense to speak about the body of an
+   entity.  Any sort of field may be present in the header of an entity,
+   but only those fields whose names begin with "content-" actually have
+   any MIME-related meaning.  Note that this does NOT imply thay they
+   have no meaning at all -- an entity that is also a message has non-
+   MIME header fields whose meanings are defined by RFC 822.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                     [Page 6]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+2.5.  Body Part
+
+   The term "body part" refers to an entity inside of a multipart
+   entity.
+
+2.6.  Body
+
+   The term "body", when not further qualified, means the body of an
+   entity, that is, the body of either a message or of a body part.
+
+   NOTE:  The previous four definitions are clearly circular.  This is
+   unavoidable, since the overall structure of a MIME message is indeed
+   recursive.
+
+2.7.  7bit Data
+
+   "7bit data" refers to data that is all represented as relatively
+   short lines with 998 octets or less between CRLF line separation
+   sequences [RFC-821].  No octets with decimal values greater than 127
+   are allowed and neither are NULs (octets with decimal value 0).  CR
+   (decimal value 13) and LF (decimal value 10) octets only occur as
+   part of CRLF line separation sequences.
+
+2.8.  8bit Data
+
+   "8bit data" refers to data that is all represented as relatively
+   short lines with 998 octets or less between CRLF line separation
+   sequences [RFC-821]), but octets with decimal values greater than 127
+   may be used.  As with "7bit data" CR and LF octets only occur as part
+   of CRLF line separation sequences and no NULs are allowed.
+
+2.9.  Binary Data
+
+   "Binary data" refers to data where any sequence of octets whatsoever
+   is allowed.
+
+2.10.  Lines
+
+   "Lines" are defined as sequences of octets separated by a CRLF
+   sequences.  This is consistent with both RFC 821 and RFC 822.
+   "Lines" only refers to a unit of data in a message, which may or may
+   not correspond to something that is actually displayed by a user
+   agent.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                     [Page 7]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+3.  MIME Header Fields
+
+   MIME defines a number of new RFC 822 header fields that are used to
+   describe the content of a MIME entity.  These header fields occur in
+   at least two contexts:
+
+    (1)   As part of a regular RFC 822 message header.
+
+    (2)   In a MIME body part header within a multipart
+          construct.
+
+   The formal definition of these header fields is as follows:
+
+     entity-headers := [ content CRLF ]
+                       [ encoding CRLF ]
+                       [ id CRLF ]
+                       [ description CRLF ]
+                       *( MIME-extension-field CRLF )
+
+     MIME-message-headers := entity-headers
+                             fields
+                             version CRLF
+                             ; The ordering of the header
+                             ; fields implied by this BNF
+                             ; definition should be ignored.
+
+     MIME-part-headers := entity-headers
+                          [ fields ]
+                          ; Any field not beginning with
+                          ; "content-" can have no defined
+                          ; meaning and may be ignored.
+                          ; The ordering of the header
+                          ; fields implied by this BNF
+                          ; definition should be ignored.
+
+   The syntax of the various specific MIME header fields will be
+   described in the following sections.
+
+4.  MIME-Version Header Field
+
+   Since RFC 822 was published in 1982, there has really been only one
+   format standard for Internet messages, and there has been little
+   perceived need to declare the format standard in use.  This document
+   is an independent specification that complements RFC 822.  Although
+   the extensions in this document have been defined in such a way as to
+   be compatible with RFC 822, there are still circumstances in which it
+   might be desirable for a mail-processing agent to know whether a
+   message was composed with the new standard in mind.
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                     [Page 8]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   Therefore, this document defines a new header field, "MIME-Version",
+   which is to be used to declare the version of the Internet message
+   body format standard in use.
+
+   Messages composed in accordance with this document MUST include such
+   a header field, with the following verbatim text:
+
+     MIME-Version: 1.0
+
+   The presence of this header field is an assertion that the message
+   has been composed in compliance with this document.
+
+   Since it is possible that a future document might extend the message
+   format standard again, a formal BNF is given for the content of the
+   MIME-Version field:
+
+     version := "MIME-Version" ":" 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT
+
+   Thus, future format specifiers, which might replace or extend "1.0",
+   are constrained to be two integer fields, separated by a period.  If
+   a message is received with a MIME-version value other than "1.0", it
+   cannot be assumed to conform with this document.
+
+   Note that the MIME-Version header field is required at the top level
+   of a message.  It is not required for each body part of a multipart
+   entity.  It is required for the embedded headers of a body of type
+   "message/rfc822" or "message/partial" if and only if the embedded
+   message is itself claimed to be MIME-conformant.
+
+   It is not possible to fully specify how a mail reader that conforms
+   with MIME as defined in this document should treat a message that
+   might arrive in the future with some value of MIME-Version other than
+   "1.0".
+
+   It is also worth noting that version control for specific media types
+   is not accomplished using the MIME-Version mechanism.  In particular,
+   some formats (such as application/postscript) have version numbering
+   conventions that are internal to the media format.  Where such
+   conventions exist, MIME does nothing to supersede them.  Where no
+   such conventions exist, a MIME media type might use a "version"
+   parameter in the content-type field if necessary.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                     [Page 9]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   NOTE TO IMPLEMENTORS:  When checking MIME-Version values any RFC 822
+   comment strings that are present must be ignored.  In particular, the
+   following four MIME-Version fields are equivalent:
+
+     MIME-Version: 1.0
+
+     MIME-Version: 1.0 (produced by MetaSend Vx.x)
+
+     MIME-Version: (produced by MetaSend Vx.x) 1.0
+
+     MIME-Version: 1.(produced by MetaSend Vx.x)0
+
+   In the absence of a MIME-Version field, a receiving mail user agent
+   (whether conforming to MIME requirements or not) may optionally
+   choose to interpret the body of the message according to local
+   conventions.  Many such conventions are currently in use and it
+   should be noted that in practice non-MIME messages can contain just
+   about anything.
+
+   It is impossible to be certain that a non-MIME mail message is
+   actually plain text in the US-ASCII character set since it might well
+   be a message that, using some set of nonstandard local conventions
+   that predate MIME, includes text in another character set or non-
+   textual data presented in a manner that cannot be automatically
+   recognized (e.g., a uuencoded compressed UNIX tar file).
+
+5.  Content-Type Header Field
+
+   The purpose of the Content-Type field is to describe the data
+   contained in the body fully enough that the receiving user agent can
+   pick an appropriate agent or mechanism to present the data to the
+   user, or otherwise deal with the data in an appropriate manner. The
+   value in this field is called a media type.
+
+   HISTORICAL NOTE:  The Content-Type header field was first defined in
+   RFC 1049.  RFC 1049 used a simpler and less powerful syntax, but one
+   that is largely compatible with the mechanism given here.
+
+   The Content-Type header field specifies the nature of the data in the
+   body of an entity by giving media type and subtype identifiers, and
+   by providing auxiliary information that may be required for certain
+   media types.  After the media type and subtype names, the remainder
+   of the header field is simply a set of parameters, specified in an
+   attribute=value notation.  The ordering of parameters is not
+   significant.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 10]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   In general, the top-level media type is used to declare the general
+   type of data, while the subtype specifies a specific format for that
+   type of data.  Thus, a media type of "image/xyz" is enough to tell a
+   user agent that the data is an image, even if the user agent has no
+   knowledge of the specific image format "xyz".  Such information can
+   be used, for example, to decide whether or not to show a user the raw
+   data from an unrecognized subtype -- such an action might be
+   reasonable for unrecognized subtypes of text, but not for
+   unrecognized subtypes of image or audio.  For this reason, registered
+   subtypes of text, image, audio, and video should not contain embedded
+   information that is really of a different type.  Such compound
+   formats should be represented using the "multipart" or "application"
+   types.
+
+   Parameters are modifiers of the media subtype, and as such do not
+   fundamentally affect the nature of the content.  The set of
+   meaningful parameters depends on the media type and subtype.  Most
+   parameters are associated with a single specific subtype.  However, a
+   given top-level media type may define parameters which are applicable
+   to any subtype of that type.  Parameters may be required by their
+   defining content type or subtype or they may be optional. MIME
+   implementations must ignore any parameters whose names they do not
+   recognize.
+
+   For example, the "charset" parameter is applicable to any subtype of
+   "text", while the "boundary" parameter is required for any subtype of
+   the "multipart" media type.
+
+   There are NO globally-meaningful parameters that apply to all media
+   types.  Truly global mechanisms are best addressed, in the MIME
+   model, by the definition of additional Content-* header fields.
+
+   An initial set of seven top-level media types is defined in RFC 2046.
+   Five of these are discrete types whose content is essentially opaque
+   as far as MIME processing is concerned.  The remaining two are
+   composite types whose contents require additional handling by MIME
+   processors.
+
+   This set of top-level media types is intended to be substantially
+   complete.  It is expected that additions to the larger set of
+   supported types can generally be accomplished by the creation of new
+   subtypes of these initial types.  In the future, more top-level types
+   may be defined only by a standards-track extension to this standard.
+   If another top-level type is to be used for any reason, it must be
+   given a name starting with "X-" to indicate its non-standard status
+   and to avoid a potential conflict with a future official name.
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 11]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+5.1.  Syntax of the Content-Type Header Field
+
+   In the Augmented BNF notation of RFC 822, a Content-Type header field
+   value is defined as follows:
+
+     content := "Content-Type" ":" type "/" subtype
+                *(";" parameter)
+                ; Matching of media type and subtype
+                ; is ALWAYS case-insensitive.
+
+     type := discrete-type / composite-type
+
+     discrete-type := "text" / "image" / "audio" / "video" /
+                      "application" / extension-token
+
+     composite-type := "message" / "multipart" / extension-token
+
+     extension-token := ietf-token / x-token
+
+     ietf-token := <An extension token defined by a
+                    standards-track RFC and registered
+                    with IANA.>
+
+     x-token := <The two characters "X-" or "x-" followed, with
+                 no intervening white space, by any token>
+
+     subtype := extension-token / iana-token
+
+     iana-token := <A publicly-defined extension token. Tokens
+                    of this form must be registered with IANA
+                    as specified in RFC 2048.>
+
+     parameter := attribute "=" value
+
+     attribute := token
+                  ; Matching of attributes
+                  ; is ALWAYS case-insensitive.
+
+     value := token / quoted-string
+
+     token := 1*<any (US-ASCII) CHAR except SPACE, CTLs,
+                 or tspecials>
+
+     tspecials :=  "(" / ")" / "<" / ">" / "@" /
+                   "," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <">
+                   "/" / "[" / "]" / "?" / "="
+                   ; Must be in quoted-string,
+                   ; to use within parameter values
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 12]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   Note that the definition of "tspecials" is the same as the RFC 822
+   definition of "specials" with the addition of the three characters
+   "/", "?", and "=", and the removal of ".".
+
+   Note also that a subtype specification is MANDATORY -- it may not be
+   omitted from a Content-Type header field.  As such, there are no
+   default subtypes.
+
+   The type, subtype, and parameter names are not case sensitive.  For
+   example, TEXT, Text, and TeXt are all equivalent top-level media
+   types.  Parameter values are normally case sensitive, but sometimes
+   are interpreted in a case-insensitive fashion, depending on the
+   intended use.  (For example, multipart boundaries are case-sensitive,
+   but the "access-type" parameter for message/External-body is not
+   case-sensitive.)
+
+   Note that the value of a quoted string parameter does not include the
+   quotes.  That is, the quotation marks in a quoted-string are not a
+   part of the value of the parameter, but are merely used to delimit
+   that parameter value.  In addition, comments are allowed in
+   accordance with RFC 822 rules for structured header fields.  Thus the
+   following two forms
+
+     Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii (Plain text)
+
+     Content-type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
+
+   are completely equivalent.
+
+   Beyond this syntax, the only syntactic constraint on the definition
+   of subtype names is the desire that their uses must not conflict.
+   That is, it would be undesirable to have two different communities
+   using "Content-Type: application/foobar" to mean two different
+   things.  The process of defining new media subtypes, then, is not
+   intended to be a mechanism for imposing restrictions, but simply a
+   mechanism for publicizing their definition and usage.  There are,
+   therefore, two acceptable mechanisms for defining new media subtypes:
+
+    (1)   Private values (starting with "X-") may be defined
+          bilaterally between two cooperating agents without
+          outside registration or standardization. Such values
+          cannot be registered or standardized.
+
+    (2)   New standard values should be registered with IANA as
+          described in RFC 2048.
+
+   The second document in this set, RFC 2046, defines the initial set of
+   media types for MIME.
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 13]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+5.2.  Content-Type Defaults
+
+   Default RFC 822 messages without a MIME Content-Type header are taken
+   by this protocol to be plain text in the US-ASCII character set,
+   which can be explicitly specified as:
+
+     Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
+
+   This default is assumed if no Content-Type header field is specified.
+   It is also recommend that this default be assumed when a
+   syntactically invalid Content-Type header field is encountered. In
+   the presence of a MIME-Version header field and the absence of any
+   Content-Type header field, a receiving User Agent can also assume
+   that plain US-ASCII text was the sender's intent.  Plain US-ASCII
+   text may still be assumed in the absence of a MIME-Version or the
+   presence of an syntactically invalid Content-Type header field, but
+   the sender's intent might have been otherwise.
+
+6.  Content-Transfer-Encoding Header Field
+
+   Many media types which could be usefully transported via email are
+   represented, in their "natural" format, as 8bit character or binary
+   data.  Such data cannot be transmitted over some transfer protocols.
+   For example, RFC 821 (SMTP) restricts mail messages to 7bit US-ASCII
+   data with lines no longer than 1000 characters including any trailing
+   CRLF line separator.
+
+   It is necessary, therefore, to define a standard mechanism for
+   encoding such data into a 7bit short line format.  Proper labelling
+   of unencoded material in less restrictive formats for direct use over
+   less restrictive transports is also desireable.  This document
+   specifies that such encodings will be indicated by a new "Content-
+   Transfer-Encoding" header field.  This field has not been defined by
+   any previous standard.
+
+6.1.  Content-Transfer-Encoding Syntax
+
+   The Content-Transfer-Encoding field's value is a single token
+   specifying the type of encoding, as enumerated below.  Formally:
+
+     encoding := "Content-Transfer-Encoding" ":" mechanism
+
+     mechanism := "7bit" / "8bit" / "binary" /
+                  "quoted-printable" / "base64" /
+                  ietf-token / x-token
+
+   These values are not case sensitive -- Base64 and BASE64 and bAsE64
+   are all equivalent.  An encoding type of 7BIT requires that the body
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 14]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   is already in a 7bit mail-ready representation.  This is the default
+   value -- that is, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT" is assumed if the
+   Content-Transfer-Encoding header field is not present.
+
+6.2.  Content-Transfer-Encodings Semantics
+
+   This single Content-Transfer-Encoding token actually provides two
+   pieces of information.  It specifies what sort of encoding
+   transformation the body was subjected to and hence what decoding
+   operation must be used to restore it to its original form, and it
+   specifies what the domain of the result is.
+
+   The transformation part of any Content-Transfer-Encodings specifies,
+   either explicitly or implicitly, a single, well-defined decoding
+   algorithm, which for any sequence of encoded octets either transforms
+   it to the original sequence of octets which was encoded, or shows
+   that it is illegal as an encoded sequence.  Content-Transfer-
+   Encodings transformations never depend on any additional external
+   profile information for proper operation. Note that while decoders
+   must produce a single, well-defined output for a valid encoding no
+   such restrictions exist for encoders: Encoding a given sequence of
+   octets to different, equivalent encoded sequences is perfectly legal.
+
+   Three transformations are currently defined: identity, the "quoted-
+   printable" encoding, and the "base64" encoding.  The domains are
+   "binary", "8bit" and "7bit".
+
+   The Content-Transfer-Encoding values "7bit", "8bit", and "binary" all
+   mean that the identity (i.e. NO) encoding transformation has been
+   performed.  As such, they serve simply as indicators of the domain of
+   the body data, and provide useful information about the sort of
+   encoding that might be needed for transmission in a given transport
+   system.  The terms "7bit data", "8bit data", and "binary data" are
+   all defined in Section 2.
+
+   The quoted-printable and base64 encodings transform their input from
+   an arbitrary domain into material in the "7bit" range, thus making it
+   safe to carry over restricted transports.  The specific definition of
+   the transformations are given below.
+
+   The proper Content-Transfer-Encoding label must always be used.
+   Labelling unencoded data containing 8bit characters as "7bit" is not
+   allowed, nor is labelling unencoded non-line-oriented data as
+   anything other than "binary" allowed.
+
+   Unlike media subtypes, a proliferation of Content-Transfer-Encoding
+   values is both undesirable and unnecessary.  However, establishing
+   only a single transformation into the "7bit" domain does not seem
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 15]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   possible.  There is a tradeoff between the desire for a compact and
+   efficient encoding of largely- binary data and the desire for a
+   somewhat readable encoding of data that is mostly, but not entirely,
+   7bit.  For this reason, at least two encoding mechanisms are
+   necessary: a more or less readable encoding (quoted-printable) and a
+   "dense" or "uniform" encoding (base64).
+
+   Mail transport for unencoded 8bit data is defined in RFC 1652.  As of
+   the initial publication of this document, there are no standardized
+   Internet mail transports for which it is legitimate to include
+   unencoded binary data in mail bodies.  Thus there are no
+   circumstances in which the "binary" Content-Transfer-Encoding is
+   actually valid in Internet mail.  However, in the event that binary
+   mail transport becomes a reality in Internet mail, or when MIME is
+   used in conjunction with any other binary-capable mail transport
+   mechanism, binary bodies must be labelled as such using this
+   mechanism.
+
+   NOTE: The five values defined for the Content-Transfer-Encoding field
+   imply nothing about the media type other than the algorithm by which
+   it was encoded or the transport system requirements if unencoded.
+
+6.3.  New Content-Transfer-Encodings
+
+   Implementors may, if necessary, define private Content-Transfer-
+   Encoding values, but must use an x-token, which is a name prefixed by
+   "X-", to indicate its non-standard status, e.g., "Content-Transfer-
+   Encoding: x-my-new-encoding".  Additional standardized Content-
+   Transfer-Encoding values must be specified by a standards-track RFC.
+   The requirements such specifications must meet are given in RFC 2048.
+   As such, all content-transfer-encoding namespace except that
+   beginning with "X-" is explicitly reserved to the IETF for future
+   use.
+
+   Unlike media types and subtypes, the creation of new Content-
+   Transfer-Encoding values is STRONGLY discouraged, as it seems likely
+   to hinder interoperability with little potential benefit
+
+6.4.  Interpretation and Use
+
+   If a Content-Transfer-Encoding header field appears as part of a
+   message header, it applies to the entire body of that message.  If a
+   Content-Transfer-Encoding header field appears as part of an entity's
+   headers, it applies only to the body of that entity.  If an entity is
+   of type "multipart" the Content-Transfer-Encoding is not permitted to
+   have any value other than "7bit", "8bit" or "binary".  Even more
+   severe restrictions apply to some subtypes of the "message" type.
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 16]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   It should be noted that most media types are defined in terms of
+   octets rather than bits, so that the mechanisms described here are
+   mechanisms for encoding arbitrary octet streams, not bit streams.  If
+   a bit stream is to be encoded via one of these mechanisms, it must
+   first be converted to an 8bit byte stream using the network standard
+   bit order ("big-endian"), in which the earlier bits in a stream
+   become the higher-order bits in a 8bit byte.  A bit stream not ending
+   at an 8bit boundary must be padded with zeroes. RFC 2046 provides a
+   mechanism for noting the addition of such padding in the case of the
+   application/octet-stream media type, which has a "padding" parameter.
+
+   The encoding mechanisms defined here explicitly encode all data in
+   US-ASCII.  Thus, for example, suppose an entity has header fields
+   such as:
+
+     Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
+     Content-transfer-encoding: base64
+
+   This must be interpreted to mean that the body is a base64 US-ASCII
+   encoding of data that was originally in ISO-8859-1, and will be in
+   that character set again after decoding.
+
+   Certain Content-Transfer-Encoding values may only be used on certain
+   media types.  In particular, it is EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN to use any
+   encodings other than "7bit", "8bit", or "binary" with any composite
+   media type, i.e. one that recursively includes other Content-Type
+   fields.  Currently the only composite media types are "multipart" and
+   "message".  All encodings that are desired for bodies of type
+   multipart or message must be done at the innermost level, by encoding
+   the actual body that needs to be encoded.
+
+   It should also be noted that, by definition, if a composite entity
+   has a transfer-encoding value such as "7bit", but one of the enclosed
+   entities has a less restrictive value such as "8bit", then either the
+   outer "7bit" labelling is in error, because 8bit data are included,
+   or the inner "8bit" labelling placed an unnecessarily high demand on
+   the transport system because the actual included data were actually
+   7bit-safe.
+
+   NOTE ON ENCODING RESTRICTIONS:  Though the prohibition against using
+   content-transfer-encodings on composite body data may seem overly
+   restrictive, it is necessary to prevent nested encodings, in which
+   data are passed through an encoding algorithm multiple times, and
+   must be decoded multiple times in order to be properly viewed.
+   Nested encodings add considerable complexity to user agents:  Aside
+   from the obvious efficiency problems with such multiple encodings,
+   they can obscure the basic structure of a message.  In particular,
+   they can imply that several decoding operations are necessary simply
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 17]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   to find out what types of bodies a message contains.  Banning nested
+   encodings may complicate the job of certain mail gateways, but this
+   seems less of a problem than the effect of nested encodings on user
+   agents.
+
+   Any entity with an unrecognized Content-Transfer-Encoding must be
+   treated as if it has a Content-Type of "application/octet-stream",
+   regardless of what the Content-Type header field actually says.
+
+   NOTE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONTENT-TYPE AND CONTENT-TRANSFER-
+   ENCODING: It may seem that the Content-Transfer-Encoding could be
+   inferred from the characteristics of the media that is to be encoded,
+   or, at the very least, that certain Content-Transfer-Encodings could
+   be mandated for use with specific media types.  There are several
+   reasons why this is not the case. First, given the varying types of
+   transports used for mail, some encodings may be appropriate for some
+   combinations of media types and transports but not for others.  (For
+   example, in an 8bit transport, no encoding would be required for text
+   in certain character sets, while such encodings are clearly required
+   for 7bit SMTP.)
+
+   Second, certain media types may require different types of transfer
+   encoding under different circumstances.  For example, many PostScript
+   bodies might consist entirely of short lines of 7bit data and hence
+   require no encoding at all.  Other PostScript bodies (especially
+   those using Level 2 PostScript's binary encoding mechanism) may only
+   be reasonably represented using a binary transport encoding.
+   Finally, since the Content-Type field is intended to be an open-ended
+   specification mechanism, strict specification of an association
+   between media types and encodings effectively couples the
+   specification of an application protocol with a specific lower-level
+   transport.  This is not desirable since the developers of a media
+   type should not have to be aware of all the transports in use and
+   what their limitations are.
+
+6.5.  Translating Encodings
+
+   The quoted-printable and base64 encodings are designed so that
+   conversion between them is possible.  The only issue that arises in
+   such a conversion is the handling of hard line breaks in quoted-
+   printable encoding output. When converting from quoted-printable to
+   base64 a hard line break in the quoted-printable form represents a
+   CRLF sequence in the canonical form of the data. It must therefore be
+   converted to a corresponding encoded CRLF in the base64 form of the
+   data.  Similarly, a CRLF sequence in the canonical form of the data
+   obtained after base64 decoding must be converted to a quoted-
+   printable hard line break, but ONLY when converting text data.
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 18]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+6.6.  Canonical Encoding Model
+
+   There was some confusion, in the previous versions of this RFC,
+   regarding the model for when email data was to be converted to
+   canonical form and encoded, and in particular how this process would
+   affect the treatment of CRLFs, given that the representation of
+   newlines varies greatly from system to system, and the relationship
+   between content-transfer-encodings and character sets.  A canonical
+   model for encoding is presented in RFC 2049 for this reason.
+
+6.7.  Quoted-Printable Content-Transfer-Encoding
+
+   The Quoted-Printable encoding is intended to represent data that
+   largely consists of octets that correspond to printable characters in
+   the US-ASCII character set.  It encodes the data in such a way that
+   the resulting octets are unlikely to be modified by mail transport.
+   If the data being encoded are mostly US-ASCII text, the encoded form
+   of the data remains largely recognizable by humans.  A body which is
+   entirely US-ASCII may also be encoded in Quoted-Printable to ensure
+   the integrity of the data should the message pass through a
+   character-translating, and/or line-wrapping gateway.
+
+   In this encoding, octets are to be represented as determined by the
+   following rules:
+
+    (1)   (General 8bit representation) Any octet, except a CR or
+          LF that is part of a CRLF line break of the canonical
+          (standard) form of the data being encoded, may be
+          represented by an "=" followed by a two digit
+          hexadecimal representation of the octet's value.  The
+          digits of the hexadecimal alphabet, for this purpose,
+          are "0123456789ABCDEF".  Uppercase letters must be
+          used; lowercase letters are not allowed.  Thus, for
+          example, the decimal value 12 (US-ASCII form feed) can
+          be represented by "=0C", and the decimal value 61 (US-
+          ASCII EQUAL SIGN) can be represented by "=3D".  This
+          rule must be followed except when the following rules
+          allow an alternative encoding.
+
+    (2)   (Literal representation) Octets with decimal values of
+          33 through 60 inclusive, and 62 through 126, inclusive,
+          MAY be represented as the US-ASCII characters which
+          correspond to those octets (EXCLAMATION POINT through
+          LESS THAN, and GREATER THAN through TILDE,
+          respectively).
+
+    (3)   (White Space) Octets with values of 9 and 32 MAY be
+          represented as US-ASCII TAB (HT) and SPACE characters,
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 19]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+          respectively, but MUST NOT be so represented at the end
+          of an encoded line.  Any TAB (HT) or SPACE characters
+          on an encoded line MUST thus be followed on that line
+          by a printable character.  In particular, an "=" at the
+          end of an encoded line, indicating a soft line break
+          (see rule #5) may follow one or more TAB (HT) or SPACE
+          characters.  It follows that an octet with decimal
+          value 9 or 32 appearing at the end of an encoded line
+          must be represented according to Rule #1.  This rule is
+          necessary because some MTAs (Message Transport Agents,
+          programs which transport messages from one user to
+          another, or perform a portion of such transfers) are
+          known to pad lines of text with SPACEs, and others are
+          known to remove "white space" characters from the end
+          of a line.  Therefore, when decoding a Quoted-Printable
+          body, any trailing white space on a line must be
+          deleted, as it will necessarily have been added by
+          intermediate transport agents.
+
+    (4)   (Line Breaks) A line break in a text body, represented
+          as a CRLF sequence in the text canonical form, must be
+          represented by a (RFC 822) line break, which is also a
+          CRLF sequence, in the Quoted-Printable encoding.  Since
+          the canonical representation of media types other than
+          text do not generally include the representation of
+          line breaks as CRLF sequences, no hard line breaks
+          (i.e. line breaks that are intended to be meaningful
+          and to be displayed to the user) can occur in the
+          quoted-printable encoding of such types.  Sequences
+          like "=0D", "=0A", "=0A=0D" and "=0D=0A" will routinely
+          appear in non-text data represented in quoted-
+          printable, of course.
+
+          Note that many implementations may elect to encode the
+          local representation of various content types directly
+          rather than converting to canonical form first,
+          encoding, and then converting back to local
+          representation.  In particular, this may apply to plain
+          text material on systems that use newline conventions
+          other than a CRLF terminator sequence.  Such an
+          implementation optimization is permissible, but only
+          when the combined canonicalization-encoding step is
+          equivalent to performing the three steps separately.
+
+    (5)   (Soft Line Breaks) The Quoted-Printable encoding
+          REQUIRES that encoded lines be no more than 76
+          characters long.  If longer lines are to be encoded
+          with the Quoted-Printable encoding, "soft" line breaks
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 20]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+          must be used.  An equal sign as the last character on a
+          encoded line indicates such a non-significant ("soft")
+          line break in the encoded text.
+
+   Thus if the "raw" form of the line is a single unencoded line that
+   says:
+
+     Now's the time for all folk to come to the aid of their country.
+
+   This can be represented, in the Quoted-Printable encoding, as:
+
+     Now's the time =
+     for all folk to come=
+      to the aid of their country.
+
+   This provides a mechanism with which long lines are encoded in such a
+   way as to be restored by the user agent.  The 76 character limit does
+   not count the trailing CRLF, but counts all other characters,
+   including any equal signs.
+
+   Since the hyphen character ("-") may be represented as itself in the
+   Quoted-Printable encoding, care must be taken, when encapsulating a
+   quoted-printable encoded body inside one or more multipart entities,
+   to ensure that the boundary delimiter does not appear anywhere in the
+   encoded body.  (A good strategy is to choose a boundary that includes
+   a character sequence such as "=_" which can never appear in a
+   quoted-printable body.  See the definition of multipart messages in
+   RFC 2046.)
+
+   NOTE: The quoted-printable encoding represents something of a
+   compromise between readability and reliability in transport.  Bodies
+   encoded with the quoted-printable encoding will work reliably over
+   most mail gateways, but may not work perfectly over a few gateways,
+   notably those involving translation into EBCDIC.  A higher level of
+   confidence is offered by the base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding.  A way
+   to get reasonably reliable transport through EBCDIC gateways is to
+   also quote the US-ASCII characters
+
+     !"#$@[\]^`{|}~
+
+   according to rule #1.
+
+   Because quoted-printable data is generally assumed to be line-
+   oriented, it is to be expected that the representation of the breaks
+   between the lines of quoted-printable data may be altered in
+   transport, in the same manner that plain text mail has always been
+   altered in Internet mail when passing between systems with differing
+   newline conventions.  If such alterations are likely to constitute a
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 21]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   corruption of the data, it is probably more sensible to use the
+   base64 encoding rather than the quoted-printable encoding.
+
+   NOTE: Several kinds of substrings cannot be generated according to
+   the encoding rules for the quoted-printable content-transfer-
+   encoding, and hence are formally illegal if they appear in the output
+   of a quoted-printable encoder. This note enumerates these cases and
+   suggests ways to handle such illegal substrings if any are
+   encountered in quoted-printable data that is to be decoded.
+
+    (1)   An "=" followed by two hexadecimal digits, one or both
+          of which are lowercase letters in "abcdef", is formally
+          illegal. A robust implementation might choose to
+          recognize them as the corresponding uppercase letters.
+
+    (2)   An "=" followed by a character that is neither a
+          hexadecimal digit (including "abcdef") nor the CR
+          character of a CRLF pair is illegal.  This case can be
+          the result of US-ASCII text having been included in a
+          quoted-printable part of a message without itself
+          having been subjected to quoted-printable encoding.  A
+          reasonable approach by a robust implementation might be
+          to include the "=" character and the following
+          character in the decoded data without any
+          transformation and, if possible, indicate to the user
+          that proper decoding was not possible at this point in
+          the data.
+
+    (3)   An "=" cannot be the ultimate or penultimate character
+          in an encoded object.  This could be handled as in case
+          (2) above.
+
+    (4)   Control characters other than TAB, or CR and LF as
+          parts of CRLF pairs, must not appear. The same is true
+          for octets with decimal values greater than 126.  If
+          found in incoming quoted-printable data by a decoder, a
+          robust implementation might exclude them from the
+          decoded data and warn the user that illegal characters
+          were discovered.
+
+    (5)   Encoded lines must not be longer than 76 characters,
+          not counting the trailing CRLF. If longer lines are
+          found in incoming, encoded data, a robust
+          implementation might nevertheless decode the lines, and
+          might report the erroneous encoding to the user.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 22]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   WARNING TO IMPLEMENTORS:  If binary data is encoded in quoted-
+   printable, care must be taken to encode CR and LF characters as "=0D"
+   and "=0A", respectively.  In particular, a CRLF sequence in binary
+   data should be encoded as "=0D=0A".  Otherwise, if CRLF were
+   represented as a hard line break, it might be incorrectly decoded on
+   platforms with different line break conventions.
+
+   For formalists, the syntax of quoted-printable data is described by
+   the following grammar:
+
+     quoted-printable := qp-line *(CRLF qp-line)
+
+     qp-line := *(qp-segment transport-padding CRLF)
+                qp-part transport-padding
+
+     qp-part := qp-section
+                ; Maximum length of 76 characters
+
+     qp-segment := qp-section *(SPACE / TAB) "="
+                   ; Maximum length of 76 characters
+
+     qp-section := [*(ptext / SPACE / TAB) ptext]
+
+     ptext := hex-octet / safe-char
+
+     safe-char := <any octet with decimal value of 33 through
+                  60 inclusive, and 62 through 126>
+                  ; Characters not listed as "mail-safe" in
+                  ; RFC 2049 are also not recommended.
+
+     hex-octet := "=" 2(DIGIT / "A" / "B" / "C" / "D" / "E" / "F")
+                  ; Octet must be used for characters > 127, =,
+                  ; SPACEs or TABs at the ends of lines, and is
+                  ; recommended for any character not listed in
+                  ; RFC 2049 as "mail-safe".
+
+     transport-padding := *LWSP-char
+                          ; Composers MUST NOT generate
+                          ; non-zero length transport
+                          ; padding, but receivers MUST
+                          ; be able to handle padding
+                          ; added by message transports.
+
+   IMPORTANT:  The addition of LWSP between the elements shown in this
+   BNF is NOT allowed since this BNF does not specify a structured
+   header field.
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 23]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+6.8.  Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding
+
+   The Base64 Content-Transfer-Encoding is designed to represent
+   arbitrary sequences of octets in a form that need not be humanly
+   readable.  The encoding and decoding algorithms are simple, but the
+   encoded data are consistently only about 33 percent larger than the
+   unencoded data.  This encoding is virtually identical to the one used
+   in Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) applications, as defined in RFC 1421.
+
+   A 65-character subset of US-ASCII is used, enabling 6 bits to be
+   represented per printable character. (The extra 65th character, "=",
+   is used to signify a special processing function.)
+
+   NOTE:  This subset has the important property that it is represented
+   identically in all versions of ISO 646, including US-ASCII, and all
+   characters in the subset are also represented identically in all
+   versions of EBCDIC. Other popular encodings, such as the encoding
+   used by the uuencode utility, Macintosh binhex 4.0 [RFC-1741], and
+   the base85 encoding specified as part of Level 2 PostScript, do not
+   share these properties, and thus do not fulfill the portability
+   requirements a binary transport encoding for mail must meet.
+
+   The encoding process represents 24-bit groups of input bits as output
+   strings of 4 encoded characters.  Proceeding from left to right, a
+   24-bit input group is formed by concatenating 3 8bit input groups.
+   These 24 bits are then treated as 4 concatenated 6-bit groups, each
+   of which is translated into a single digit in the base64 alphabet.
+   When encoding a bit stream via the base64 encoding, the bit stream
+   must be presumed to be ordered with the most-significant-bit first.
+   That is, the first bit in the stream will be the high-order bit in
+   the first 8bit byte, and the eighth bit will be the low-order bit in
+   the first 8bit byte, and so on.
+
+   Each 6-bit group is used as an index into an array of 64 printable
+   characters.  The character referenced by the index is placed in the
+   output string.  These characters, identified in Table 1, below, are
+   selected so as to be universally representable, and the set excludes
+   characters with particular significance to SMTP (e.g., ".", CR, LF)
+   and to the multipart boundary delimiters defined in RFC 2046 (e.g.,
+   "-").
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 24]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+                    Table 1: The Base64 Alphabet
+
+     Value Encoding  Value Encoding  Value Encoding  Value Encoding
+         0 A            17 R            34 i            51 z
+         1 B            18 S            35 j            52 0
+         2 C            19 T            36 k            53 1
+         3 D            20 U            37 l            54 2
+         4 E            21 V            38 m            55 3
+         5 F            22 W            39 n            56 4
+         6 G            23 X            40 o            57 5
+         7 H            24 Y            41 p            58 6
+         8 I            25 Z            42 q            59 7
+         9 J            26 a            43 r            60 8
+        10 K            27 b            44 s            61 9
+        11 L            28 c            45 t            62 +
+        12 M            29 d            46 u            63 /
+        13 N            30 e            47 v
+        14 O            31 f            48 w         (pad) =
+        15 P            32 g            49 x
+        16 Q            33 h            50 y
+
+   The encoded output stream must be represented in lines of no more
+   than 76 characters each.  All line breaks or other characters not
+   found in Table 1 must be ignored by decoding software.  In base64
+   data, characters other than those in Table 1, line breaks, and other
+   white space probably indicate a transmission error, about which a
+   warning message or even a message rejection might be appropriate
+   under some circumstances.
+
+   Special processing is performed if fewer than 24 bits are available
+   at the end of the data being encoded.  A full encoding quantum is
+   always completed at the end of a body.  When fewer than 24 input bits
+   are available in an input group, zero bits are added (on the right)
+   to form an integral number of 6-bit groups.  Padding at the end of
+   the data is performed using the "=" character.  Since all base64
+   input is an integral number of octets, only the following cases can
+   arise: (1) the final quantum of encoding input is an integral
+   multiple of 24 bits; here, the final unit of encoded output will be
+   an integral multiple of 4 characters with no "=" padding, (2) the
+   final quantum of encoding input is exactly 8 bits; here, the final
+   unit of encoded output will be two characters followed by two "="
+   padding characters, or (3) the final quantum of encoding input is
+   exactly 16 bits; here, the final unit of encoded output will be three
+   characters followed by one "=" padding character.
+
+   Because it is used only for padding at the end of the data, the
+   occurrence of any "=" characters may be taken as evidence that the
+   end of the data has been reached (without truncation in transit).  No
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 25]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+   such assurance is possible, however, when the number of octets
+   transmitted was a multiple of three and no "=" characters are
+   present.
+
+   Any characters outside of the base64 alphabet are to be ignored in
+   base64-encoded data.
+
+   Care must be taken to use the proper octets for line breaks if base64
+   encoding is applied directly to text material that has not been
+   converted to canonical form.  In particular, text line breaks must be
+   converted into CRLF sequences prior to base64 encoding.  The
+   important thing to note is that this may be done directly by the
+   encoder rather than in a prior canonicalization step in some
+   implementations.
+
+   NOTE: There is no need to worry about quoting potential boundary
+   delimiters within base64-encoded bodies within multipart entities
+   because no hyphen characters are used in the base64 encoding.
+
+7.  Content-ID Header Field
+
+   In constructing a high-level user agent, it may be desirable to allow
+   one body to make reference to another.  Accordingly, bodies may be
+   labelled using the "Content-ID" header field, which is syntactically
+   identical to the "Message-ID" header field:
+
+     id := "Content-ID" ":" msg-id
+
+   Like the Message-ID values, Content-ID values must be generated to be
+   world-unique.
+
+   The Content-ID value may be used for uniquely identifying MIME
+   entities in several contexts, particularly for caching data
+   referenced by the message/external-body mechanism.  Although the
+   Content-ID header is generally optional, its use is MANDATORY in
+   implementations which generate data of the optional MIME media type
+   "message/external-body".  That is, each message/external-body entity
+   must have a Content-ID field to permit caching of such data.
+
+   It is also worth noting that the Content-ID value has special
+   semantics in the case of the multipart/alternative media type.  This
+   is explained in the section of RFC 2046 dealing with
+   multipart/alternative.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 26]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+8.  Content-Description Header Field
+
+   The ability to associate some descriptive information with a given
+   body is often desirable.  For example, it may be useful to mark an
+   "image" body as "a picture of the Space Shuttle Endeavor."  Such text
+   may be placed in the Content-Description header field.  This header
+   field is always optional.
+
+     description := "Content-Description" ":" *text
+
+   The description is presumed to be given in the US-ASCII character
+   set, although the mechanism specified in RFC 2047 may be used for
+   non-US-ASCII Content-Description values.
+
+9.  Additional MIME Header Fields
+
+   Future documents may elect to define additional MIME header fields
+   for various purposes.  Any new header field that further describes
+   the content of a message should begin with the string "Content-" to
+   allow such fields which appear in a message header to be
+   distinguished from ordinary RFC 822 message header fields.
+
+     MIME-extension-field := <Any RFC 822 header field which
+                              begins with the string
+                              "Content-">
+
+10.  Summary
+
+   Using the MIME-Version, Content-Type, and Content-Transfer-Encoding
+   header fields, it is possible to include, in a standardized way,
+   arbitrary types of data with RFC 822 conformant mail messages.  No
+   restrictions imposed by either RFC 821 or RFC 822 are violated, and
+   care has been taken to avoid problems caused by additional
+   restrictions imposed by the characteristics of some Internet mail
+   transport mechanisms (see RFC 2049).
+
+   The next document in this set, RFC 2046, specifies the initial set of
+   media types that can be labelled and transported using these headers.
+
+11.  Security Considerations
+
+   Security issues are discussed in the second document in this set, RFC
+   2046.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 27]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+12.  Authors' Addresses
+
+   For more information, the authors of this document are best contacted
+   via Internet mail:
+
+   Ned Freed
+   Innosoft International, Inc.
+   1050 East Garvey Avenue South
+   West Covina, CA 91790
+   USA
+
+   Phone: +1 818 919 3600
+   Fax:   +1 818 919 3614
+   EMail: ned@innosoft.com
+
+
+   Nathaniel S. Borenstein
+   First Virtual Holdings
+   25 Washington Avenue
+   Morristown, NJ 07960
+   USA
+
+   Phone: +1 201 540 8967
+   Fax:   +1 201 993 3032
+   EMail: nsb@nsb.fv.com
+
+
+   MIME is a result of the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force
+   Working Group on RFC 822 Extensions.  The chairman of that group,
+   Greg Vaudreuil, may be reached at:
+
+   Gregory M. Vaudreuil
+   Octel Network Services
+   17080 Dallas Parkway
+   Dallas, TX 75248-1905
+   USA
+
+   EMail: Greg.Vaudreuil@Octel.Com
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 28]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+Appendix A -- Collected Grammar
+
+   This appendix contains the complete BNF grammar for all the syntax
+   specified by this document.
+
+   By itself, however, this grammar is incomplete.  It refers by name to
+   several syntax rules that are defined by RFC 822.  Rather than
+   reproduce those definitions here, and risk unintentional differences
+   between the two, this document simply refers the reader to RFC 822
+   for the remaining definitions. Wherever a term is undefined, it
+   refers to the RFC 822 definition.
+
+  attribute := token
+               ; Matching of attributes
+               ; is ALWAYS case-insensitive.
+
+  composite-type := "message" / "multipart" / extension-token
+
+  content := "Content-Type" ":" type "/" subtype
+             *(";" parameter)
+             ; Matching of media type and subtype
+             ; is ALWAYS case-insensitive.
+
+  description := "Content-Description" ":" *text
+
+  discrete-type := "text" / "image" / "audio" / "video" /
+                   "application" / extension-token
+
+  encoding := "Content-Transfer-Encoding" ":" mechanism
+
+  entity-headers := [ content CRLF ]
+                    [ encoding CRLF ]
+                    [ id CRLF ]
+                    [ description CRLF ]
+                    *( MIME-extension-field CRLF )
+
+  extension-token := ietf-token / x-token
+
+  hex-octet := "=" 2(DIGIT / "A" / "B" / "C" / "D" / "E" / "F")
+               ; Octet must be used for characters > 127, =,
+               ; SPACEs or TABs at the ends of lines, and is
+               ; recommended for any character not listed in
+               ; RFC 2049 as "mail-safe".
+
+  iana-token := <A publicly-defined extension token. Tokens
+                 of this form must be registered with IANA
+                 as specified in RFC 2048.>
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 29]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+  ietf-token := <An extension token defined by a
+                 standards-track RFC and registered
+                 with IANA.>
+
+  id := "Content-ID" ":" msg-id
+
+  mechanism := "7bit" / "8bit" / "binary" /
+               "quoted-printable" / "base64" /
+               ietf-token / x-token
+
+  MIME-extension-field := <Any RFC 822 header field which
+                           begins with the string
+                           "Content-">
+
+  MIME-message-headers := entity-headers
+                          fields
+                          version CRLF
+                          ; The ordering of the header
+                          ; fields implied by this BNF
+                          ; definition should be ignored.
+
+  MIME-part-headers := entity-headers
+                       [fields]
+                       ; Any field not beginning with
+                       ; "content-" can have no defined
+                       ; meaning and may be ignored.
+                       ; The ordering of the header
+                       ; fields implied by this BNF
+                       ; definition should be ignored.
+
+  parameter := attribute "=" value
+
+  ptext := hex-octet / safe-char
+
+  qp-line := *(qp-segment transport-padding CRLF)
+             qp-part transport-padding
+
+  qp-part := qp-section
+             ; Maximum length of 76 characters
+
+  qp-section := [*(ptext / SPACE / TAB) ptext]
+
+  qp-segment := qp-section *(SPACE / TAB) "="
+                ; Maximum length of 76 characters
+
+  quoted-printable := qp-line *(CRLF qp-line)
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 30]
+
+RFC 2045                Internet Message Bodies            November 1996
+
+
+  safe-char := <any octet with decimal value of 33 through
+               60 inclusive, and 62 through 126>
+               ; Characters not listed as "mail-safe" in
+               ; RFC 2049 are also not recommended.
+
+  subtype := extension-token / iana-token
+
+  token := 1*<any (US-ASCII) CHAR except SPACE, CTLs,
+              or tspecials>
+
+  transport-padding := *LWSP-char
+                       ; Composers MUST NOT generate
+                       ; non-zero length transport
+                       ; padding, but receivers MUST
+                       ; be able to handle padding
+                       ; added by message transports.
+
+  tspecials :=  "(" / ")" / "<" / ">" / "@" /
+                "," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <">
+                "/" / "[" / "]" / "?" / "="
+                ; Must be in quoted-string,
+                ; to use within parameter values
+
+  type := discrete-type / composite-type
+
+  value := token / quoted-string
+
+  version := "MIME-Version" ":" 1*DIGIT "." 1*DIGIT
+
+  x-token := <The two characters "X-" or "x-" followed, with
+              no  intervening white space, by any token>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Freed & Borenstein          Standards Track                    [Page 31]
+