Printable View
I have a lot of emails with me in which there are a lot of rfc 822 data files. I would like to open them but don't know how. Can someone help me to open it? I am using Firefox browser. So is it possible to open them with Firefox? I tried but Firefox always asks me how to open it.
It's in the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) format.
RFC 822 does not identify the structure of a message or the format of the data. Since it is clear that you always get one junk of plain text data, this was not necessary when the standard was defined.
MIME, in contrast, lets you send multiple pieces of different data in one message (say, a picture and a Word document), and it tells the recipient's email client what format the data is in so they can make smart choices displaying the message.
Try to save it to your desktop, and rename them to filename.rtf (Rich Text Format). From there try to open it in Wordpad.
Emails are exchanged between hosts on the internet by using SMTP. While transferring the email message, the sender SMTP specifies the address of the sender, the receiver and the data to be sent. The data is arbitrary ASCII text. SMTP does not interpret the data in any way or specify a format for it.
During the early days of email, a need was felt for a header in the data which would contain information such as the Subject, Date when the mail was sent etc. Consequently, several informal standards were developed by individuals leading to incomaptibilities. It was felt necessary to codify these practices and provide for those features that seemed imminent. This resulted in RFC 733 which was later updated by RFC 822- Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages which specifies a standard set of message headers which are followed by the message content.