MIME
Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extension
By:
RAKSHITHA J
Welcom
e
TABLE OF CONTENTS
01 Introduction 02 MIME
Headers
Web-Based E-Mail
03 04
Mail Security
INTRODUCTION
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is a supplementary protocol that allows non-
ASCII data to be sent through e-mail. MIME transforms non-ASCII data at the sender site to
NVT ASCII data and delivers it to the client MTA to be sent through the Internet. The message
at the receiving site is transformed back to the original data
MIME Headers
MIME defines five headers, as shown in Figure1.1, which can be added to the
original e-mail header section to define the transformation parameters
Figure 1.1
MIME header
• MIME-Version: This header defines the version of MIME used. The current
version is 1.1
• Content-Type: This header defines the type of data used in the body of the
message. The content type and the content subtype are separated by a slash.
Depending on the subtype, the header may contain other parameters. MIME allows
seven different types of data, listed in Table 1.2
• Content-Transfer-Encoding: This header defines the method used to
encode the messages into 0s and 1s for transport. The five types of encoding
methods are listed in Table 1.3
MIME Header
Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3
Base64-Conversion
• Base64 is a redundant
encoding scheme that is,
every six bits become one
ASCII character and are sent
as eight bits.
• We have an overhead of 25
percent.
Figure • If the data consist mostly of
1.4 ASCII characters with a
small non-ASCII portion, we
can use quoted-printable
encoding.
Base64 converting table
Figure 1.5
Quoted-printable encoding
Figure
1.6
• In quoted-printable, if a character is ASCII, it is sent as is
• If a character is not ASCII, it is sent as three characters
• The first character is the equal sign (=). The next two characters are the
hexadecimal representations of the byte.
• In the example, the third character is a non-ASCII because it starts with bit 1. It is
interpreted as two hexadecimal digits (9D16), which is replaced by three ASCII
characters (=, 9, and D).
MIME Headers
• Content-ID :This header uniquely identifies the whole message in a
multiple message environment.
• Content-Description: This header defines whether the body is
image, audio, or video.
Web-Based Mail
• E-mail is such a common application that some
websites today provide this service to anyone who
accesses the site.
• Three common sites are Hotmail, Yahoo, and
Google mail.
• The idea is very simple. Figure 1.7 & 1.8 shows two
cases:
Web-Based Mail : Case 1
• Alice, the sender, uses a traditional
mail server; Bob, the receiver, has an
account on a web-based server.
• Mail transfer from Alice’s browser to
her mail server is done through
SMTP. The transfer of the message
from the sending mail server to the
receiving mail server is still through
SMTP
• the message from the receiving
server (the web server) to Bob’s
browser is done through HTTP.
Figure 1.7
Web-Based Mail : Case 1
• When Bob needs to retrieve his e-mails, he sends a request HTTP
message to the website (Hotmail, for example).
• The website sends a form to be filled in by Bob, which includes the
log-in name and the password.
• If the log-in name and password match, the list of e-mails is
transferred from the web server to Bob’s browser in HTML format.
• Now Bob can browse through his received e-mails and then, using
more HTTP transactions, can get his e-mails one by one.
Web-Based Mail : Case 2
• Both Alice and Bob use web servers, but not
necessarily the same server.
• Alice sends the message to the web server
using HTTP transactions.
• Alice sends an HTTP request message to her
web server using the name and address of
Bob’s mailbox as the URL.
• The server at the Alice site passes the
message to the SMTP client and sends it to
the server at the Bob site using SMTP
protocol.
• Bob receives the message using HTTP
transactions. However, the message from the
server at the Alice site to the server at the Bob Figure 1.8
site still takes place using SMTP protocol.
E-Mail Security
• The protocol discussed in this chapter does not provide any security provisions per
se.
• However, e-mail exchanges can be secured using two application-layer securities
designed in particular for e-mail systems.
• Two of these protocols are :
I. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
II. Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME)
Thank you
