heterogeneous Networks a study by

Since its publication in 1982, RFC 822 (Request for Comments) has defined the standard format for almost any textual mail messages in the Internet. Together with the domain name service and the SMTP service, it possibly provides one of the most frequently used means of communication in the Internet and beyond. Though it was state of the art in 1982, during the intervening years it has become more and more clear that in the long run some limitations of this standard imply unacceptable restrictions for the fast-growing user community. The standard described in RFC 822 is limited to a definition of pure messages. The encoding scheme chosen for the transmission is a 7-bit ASCII character set. However, most European or Asian languages need a more powerful character set. Hence messages in these languages cannot be properly represented with the RFC 822 standard. Furthermore, the standard does not provide any means to include non-textual objects such as images, audio-information or video-streams into a mail body. Existing coding tools, such as uuencode and uudecode, allow the user to transform binary data to an RFC 822-compliant format and can provide a temporary work-around