What kind of file is an email ?

[manishrathi]

Picture , video, sound are binary files. Because internet isnt capable of directly handling binary files in e-mail the file is first encoded in one of variety iof encoding schemes and this file is received as an attachment.

Question is, what kind of file is email itself. Since message is all text, isnt it a binary file ? If not, then what is it ?

thanks

 

[darrellblackhawk]

Depends on the mail server, but typically, it's just a big text file.

 

[jimbopalmer]

http://www.mhonarc.org/~ehood/MIME/

describes MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)

I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[VinceWhirlwind]

MIME describes the email body.
The whole of the email though would include the headers.
The commands used to transmit it could also conceivably be considered part of each email.

RFC2821 describes SMTP:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

If you're thinking of email in terms of it being a "file", then the simple answer is that the format is defined by the individual application that created the "file".