RFC 5322

RFC 5322 is a legacy standard that defines the format for electronic mail. The basic structure of the e-mail consists of headers and a body, separated by a blank line as shown below: 

Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2022 20:53:42 (MYT)
From: Little Clover <littleclover909@gmail.com>
To: Ned Freed <ned@innosoft.com>
Cc: James Bone <jamesbone@md6.com>
Subject: Example

This is the mail body.

However, it has several limitations. It doesn’t recognised other character encoding schemes other than ASCII, non-textual data such as image and audio, and long lines (72 to 254 characters). Furthermore, it may reject the message if it exceeds a certain size. Although there are many schemes that could be used to transmit executable or binary files within RFC 5322’s boundary, none of them is the standard. Therefore, it was replaced by #Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) as the standard for mail structure.

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  • Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)

    MIME is an email standard defined by RFC 2045-2049 to handle the limitations of RFC 5322# mainly over non-ASCII character sets and non-textual attachments. Apart from inheriting the electronic mail structure from RFC5322, it extends the e-mail to support the following options:

#graphics