Internet e-mail message format

Electronic mail (e-mail or email) has been in use on the Internet (and its predecessor, the Arpanet) since the 1970s. A series of RFC documents has specified its standard transmission format. The best-known (and the one which lent its name to the official MIME type for a single message of this format) is RFC 822, but this superceded the earlier RFC 733 and was in turn later superceded by RFC 2822 and RFC 5322.

Collections of multiple messages of this type, such as mailboxes stored for the use of mail programs or list digests and archives, are stored in a number of formats including mbox.

Identifiers

 * MIME type (Internet media type): message/rfc822