RFC 2046 · DRAFT STANDARD · 1996
MON · 27 JUL 2026
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions Part Two: Media Types
Overview
RFC 2046, “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions Part Two: Media Types”, is a Draft Standard document published in November 1996 by N. Freed, N. Borenstein. It obsoletes RFC 1521, RFC 1522, RFC 1590. It has since been updated by RFC 2646, RFC 3798, RFC 5147, RFC 6657, RFC 8098. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
This second document defines the general structure of the MIME media typing system and defines an initial set of media types. [STANDARDS-TRACK]
What “Draft Standard” means
A historical maturity level (retired in 2011) that sat between Proposed Standard and Internet Standard and required multiple interoperable implementations.
Read this RFC
The canonical text of RFC 2046 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.
Relationships to other RFCs
Other RFCs from 1996
- RFC 2045 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies
- RFC 2047 MIME Part Three: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text
- RFC 2048 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions Part Four: Registration Procedures
- RFC 2044 UTF-8, a transformation format of Unicode and ISO 10646
- RFC 2049 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions Part Five: Conformance Criteria and Examples
- RFC 2043 The PPP SNA Control Protocol
- RFC 2050 Internet Registry IP Allocation Guidelines
- RFC 2051 Definitions of Managed Objects for APPC using SMIv2