What is MIME and why does it matter?

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) allows email to include text, images, audio, video, and attachments. Without it, email would only support plain text.

Before MIME arrived in the early 1990s through RFC 1341, sending attachments required manually encoding files using tools like uuencode, which produced walls of seemingly random characters that had to be copied into the message body. The recipient then had to decode it back into a usable file. It was tedious, error prone, and broke easily.

MIME automated that entire process and introduced the concept of multipart messages, where a single email could contain multiple sections such as plain text, HTML, and attachments all organized cleanly within one structure.

It is the shipping standard that allows you to send not just written letters, but parcels, photos, and full cargo containers, all properly labeled and ready to unpack.