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This document is a relatively minor revision of RFC 1341. For
the convenience of those familiar with RFC 1341, the technical
changes from that document are summarized in this appendix.
- The definition of "tspecials" has been changed to no longer
include ".".
- The Content-ID field is now mandatory for message/external-body
parts.
- The text/richtext type (including the old Section 7.1.3 and
Appendix D) has been moved to a separate document.
- The rules on header merging for message/partial data have been
changed to treat the Encrypted and MIME-Version headers as special
cases.
- The definition of the external-body access-type parameter has
been changed so that it can only indicate a single access method
(which was all that made sense).
- There is a new "Subject" parameter for message/external-body,
access-type mail-server, to permit MIME-based use of mail servers
that rely on Subject field information.
- The "conversions" parameter for application/octet-stream has been
removed.
- Section 7.4.1
now deprecates the use of the "name" parameter for
application/octet-stream, as this will be superseded in the future by
a Content-Disposition header.
- The formal grammar for multipart bodies has been changed so that
a CRLF is no longer required before the first boundary line.
- MIME entities of type "message/partial" and "message/external-
body" are now required to use only the "7bit" transfer-encoding.
(Specifically, "binary" and "8bit" are not permitted.)
- The "application/oda" content-type has been removed.
- A note has been added to the end of
Section 7.2.3, explaining
the semantics of Content-ID in a multipart/alternative MIME entity.
- The formal syntax for the "MIME-Version" field has been
tightened, but in a way that is completely compatible with the only
version number defined in RFC 1341.
- In
Section 7.3.1,
the definition of message/rfc822 has been
relaxed regarding mandatory fields.
All other changes from RFC 1341 were editorial changes and do not
affect the technical content of MIME. Considerable formal grammar
has been added, but this reflects the prose specification that was
already in place.
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