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the `Message-Id:` header line is used to associate a "unique" identifier to each email. Email identifiers are usually structured like `string@domain` where `string` is a unique character string or sequence number chosen by the sender of the email and `domain` the domain name of the sender. Since domain names are unique, a host can generate globally unique message identifiers concatenating a locally unique identifier with its domain name.
the `In-reply-to:` header line is used when a message was created in reply to a previous message. In this case, the end of the `In-reply-to:` line contains the identifier of the original message.
the `Received:` header line is used when an email message is processed by several servers before reaching its destination. Each intermediate email server adds a `Received:` header line. These header lines are useful to debug problems in delivering email messages.
The figure below shows the header lines of one email message. The message originated at a host named `wira.firstpr.com.au` and was received by `smtp3.sgsi.ucl.ac.be`. The `Received:` lines have been wrapped for readability.
Initially, email was used to exchange small messages of ASCII text between computer scientists. However, with the growth of the Internet, supporting only ASCII text became a severe limitation for two reasons. First of all, non-English speakers wanted to write emails in their native language that often required more characters than those of the ASCII character table. Second, many users wanted to send other content than just ASCII text by email such as binary files, images or sound.
To solve this problem, the IETF_ developed the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (:term:`MIME`). These extensions were carefully designed to allow Internet email to carry non-ASCII characters and binary files without breaking the email servers that were deployed at that time. This requirement for backward compatibility forced the MIME designers to develop extensions to the existing email message format :rfc:`822` instead of defining a completely new format that would have been better suited to support the new types of emails.
:rfc:`2045` defines three new types of header lines to support MIME :
The `MIME-Version:` header line indicates the version of the MIME specification that was used to encode the email message. The current version of MIME is 1.0. Other versions of MIME may be defined in the future. Thanks to this header line, the software that processes email messages will be able to adapt to the MIME version used to encode the message. Messages that do not contain this header are supposed to be formatted according to the original :rfc:`822` specification.
The `Content-Type:` header line indicates the type of data that is carried inside the message (see below).
The `Content-Transfer-Encoding:` header line is used to specify how the message has been encoded. When MIME was designed, some email servers were only able to process messages containing characters encoded using the 7 bits ASCII character set. MIME allows the utilization of other character encodings.
Inside the email header, the `Content-Type:` header line indicates how the MIME email message is structured. :rfc:`2046` defines the utilization of this header line. The two most common structures for MIME messages are :
`Content-Type: multipart/mixed`. This header line indicates that the MIME message contains several independent parts. For example, such a message may contain a part in plain text and a binary file.
`Content-Type: multipart/alternative`. This header line indicates that the MIME message contains several representations of the same information. For example, a `multipart/alternative` message may contain both a plain text and an HTML version of the same text.
To support these two types of MIME messages, the recipient of a message must be able to extract the different parts from the message. In :rfc:`822`, an empty line was used to separate the header lines from the body. Using an empty line to separate the different parts of an email body would be difficult as the body of email messages often contains one or more empty lines. Another possible option would be to define a special line, e.g. `*-LAST_LINE-*` to mark the boundary between two parts of a MIME message. Unfortunately, this is not possible as some emails may contain this string in their body (e.g. emails sent to students to explain the format of MIME messages). To solve this problem, the `Content-Type:` header line contains a second parameter that specifies the string that has been used by the sender of the MIME message to delineate the different parts. In practice, this string is often chosen randomly by the mail client.
The email message below, copied from :rfc:`2046` shows a MIME message containing two parts that are both in plain text and encoded using the ASCII character set. The string `simple boundary` is defined in the `Content-Type:` header as the marker for the boundary between two successive parts. Another example of MIME messages may be found in :rfc:`2046`.
The `Content-Type:` header can also be used inside a MIME part. In this case, it indicates the type of data placed in this part. Each data type is specified as a type followed by a subtype. A detailed description may be found in :rfc:`2046`. Some of the most popular `Content-Type:` header lines are :
`text`. The message part contains information in textual format. There are several subtypes : `text/plain` for regular ASCII text, `text/html` defined in :rfc:`2854` for documents in :term:`HTML` format or the `text/enriched` format defined in :rfc:`1896`. The `Content-Type:` header line may contain a second parameter that specifies the character set used to encode the text. `charset=us-ascii` is the standard ASCII character table. Other frequent character sets include `charset=UTF8` or `charset=iso-8859-1`. The `list of standard character sets <http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets>`_ is maintained by :term:`IANA`.
`image`. The message part contains a binary representation of an image. The subtype indicates the format of the image such as `gif <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format>`_, `jpg <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jpeg>`_ or `png <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics>`_.
`audio`. The message part contains an audio clip. The subtype indicates the format of the audio clip like `wav <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wav>`_ or `mp3 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3>`_.
`video`. The message part contains a video clip. The subtype indicates the format of the video clip like `avi <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave>`_ or `mp4 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp4>`_.
`application`. The message part contains binary information that was produced by the particular application listed as the subtype. Email clients use the subtype to launch the application that is able to decode the received binary information.
From ASCII to Unicode
The first computers used different techniques to represent characters in memory and on disk. During the 1960s, computers began to exchange information via tape or telephone lines. Unfortunately, each vendor had its own proprietary character set and exchanging data between computers from different vendors was often difficult. The 7 bits ASCII character table :rfc:`20` was adopted by several vendors and by many Internet protocols. However, ASCII became a problem with the internationalization of the Internet and the desire of more and more users to use character sets that support their own written language. A first attempt at solving this problem was the definition of the ISO-8859_ character sets by :term:`ISO`. This family of standards specified various character sets that allowed the representation of many European written languages by using 8 bits characters. Unfortunately, an 8-bits character set is not sufficient to support some widely used languages, such as those used in Asian countries. Fortunately, at the end of the 1980s, several computer scientists proposed to develop a standard that supports all written languages used on Earth today. The Unicode standard [Unicode]_ has now been adopted by most computer and software vendors. For example, Java always uses Unicode to manipulate characters, Python can handle both ASCII and Unicode characters. Internet applications are slowly moving towards complete support for the Unicode character sets, but moving from ASCII to Unicode is an important change that can have a huge impact on current deployed implementations. See, for example, the work to completely internationalize email :rfc:`4952` and domain names :rfc:`5890`.
The last MIME header line is `Content-Transfer-Encoding:`. This header line is used after the `Content-Type:` header line, within a message part, and specifies how the message part has been encoded. The default encoding is to use 7 bits ASCII. The most frequent encodings are `quoted-printable` and `Base64`. Both support encoding a sequence of bytes into a set of ASCII lines that can be safely transmitted by email servers. `quoted-printable` is defined in :rfc:`2045`. We briefly describe `base64` which is defined in :rfc:`2045` and :rfc:`4648`.
`Base64` divides the sequence of bytes to be encoded into groups of three bytes (with the last group possibly being partially filled). Each group of three bytes is then divided into four six-bit fields and each six bit field is encoded as a character from the table below.
Value
Encoding
0
A
17
R

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Source string location
../../protocols/email.rst:210
String age
3 years ago
Source string age
3 years ago
Translation file
locale/pot/protocols/email.pot, string 39