When did MIME get introduced?

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) was introduced in the early 1990s through RFC 1341 (later updated as RFC 2045) to allow email to carry more than plain text, such as attachments, images, video, and multilingual text.

Before MIME, sending attachments required encoding them manually using uuencode, copying a wall of text into the message, and having the recipient decode it back into a file. MIME automated that process entirely.

It expanded the possibilities of what could be sent through email, making it a cargo system capable of handling not just letters, but entire containers of multimedia.