Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions

Sometimes you will see a message labeled 'M' in elm. This is a message in the MIME (Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions) format. The current version of elm can read and display such messages without much trouble, only it behaves a little bit different. If the message contains binary data, these will be decoded and displayed properly (e.g. images).

Sending MIME messages is also possible. Just include a line like

[include file.gif image/gif base64]

Here "file.gif" is the file name, "image/gif" is the file type and "base64" is the encoding. All three are necessary !!

Here is the list of currently recognized MIME types.

If metamail encounters such a file type, it will look it up in the mailcap files, one on system level called mailcap, and one in the user's home directory (called .mailcap).

Note that MIME is not the only program that uses this system; WWW browsers such as Netscape also make use of this mechanism to determine which viewer to start. That is why Netscape uses a file named .mailcap (which sounds strange at first).

David.Jansen@strw.leidenuniv.nl

Last modified: Wed Dec 20 17:09:40 MET 1995