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Structure of an e-mail

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E-mails can vary in structural complexity:

  • At their simplest, they consist of headers and a message.

  • However, the e-mail can also contain attachments. The e-mail then consists of the general headers, such as “Subject” and “From”, the message (with its own headers) and the attachments (with their own headers).

  • In the most complex case, the e-mail has an attachment containing a further e-mail, which can in turn contain attachments and/or other e-mails as attachments, and so on.

The mail reader analyzes the e-mail, subdivides it for procedural processing into smaller packages and makes these individually processable packages available to the procedures. Within the procedures this permits access to the headers of the e-mail and the individual attachments, regardless of the complexity of the e-mail’s structure.

The mail reader converts all the data received from the IMAP or POP3 server from ISO-8859-1 to EDF041. If a MIME part of the mail is used as the 'base64' Content-Transfer-Encoding and the content type is 'text', the data is in turn converted from ISO-8859-1 to EDF041 in accordance with the base64 decoder. In all other cases, the processing procedures must execute any necessary character set conversion.