NOTE: Some confusion has been caused by systems that represent
   messages in a format which uses local newline conventions which
   differ from the RFC822 CRLF convention.  It is important to note that
   these formats are not canonical RFC822/MIME.  These formats are
   instead *encodings* of RFC822, where CRLF sequences in the canonical
   representation of the message are encoded as the local newline
   convention.  Note that formats which encode CRLF sequences as, for
   example, LF are not capable of representing MIME messages containing
   binary data which contains LF octets not part of CRLF line separation
   sequences.








 
RFC 2049                    MIME Conformance               November 1996


5.  Summary

   This document defines what is meant by MIME Conformance. It also
   details various problems known to exist in the Internet email system
   and how to use MIME to overcome them. Finally, it describes MIME's
   canonical encoding model.

6.  Security Considerations

   Security issues are discussed in the second document in this set, RFC
   2046.

7.  Authors' Addresses

   For more information, the authors of this document are best contacted
   via Internet mail:

   Ned Freed
   Innosoft International, Inc.
   1050 East Garvey Avenue South
   West Covina, CA 91790
   USA

   Phone: +1 818 919 3600
   Fax:   +1 818 919 3614
   EMail: ned@innosoft.com

   Nathaniel S. Borenstein
   First Virtual Holdings
   25 Washington Avenue
   Morristown, NJ 07960
   USA

   Phone: +1 201 540 8967
   Fax:   +1 201 993 3032
   EMail: nsb@nsb.fv.com

   MIME is a result of the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force
   Working Group on RFC 822 Extensions.  The chairman of that group,
   Greg Vaudreuil, may be reached at:

   Gregory M. Vaudreuil
   Octel Network Services
   17080 Dallas Parkway
   Dallas, TX 75248-1905
   USA

   EMail: Greg.Vaudreuil@Octel.Com




 
RFC 2049                    MIME Conformance               November 1996


8.  Acknowledgements

   This document is the result of the collective effort of a large
   number of people, at several IETF meetings, on the IETF-SMTP and
   IETF-822 mailing lists, and elsewhere.  Although any enumeration
   seems doomed to suffer from egregious omissions, the following are
   among the many contributors to this effort:

     Harald Tveit Alvestrand       Marc Andreessen
     Randall Atkinson              Bob Braden
     Philippe Brandon              Brian Capouch
     Kevin Carosso                 Uhhyung Choi
     Peter Clitherow               Dave Collier-Brown
     Cristian Constantinof         John Coonrod
     Mark Crispin                  Dave Crocker
     Stephen Crocker               Terry Crowley
     Walt Daniels                  Jim Davis
     Frank Dawson                  Axel Deininger
     Hitoshi Doi                   Kevin Donnelly
     Steve Dorner                  Keith Edwards
     Chris Eich                    Dana S. Emery
     Johnny Eriksson               Craig Everhart