DIME is also used to send attachments in a SOAP message. However, DIME improves over MIME in several ways. In DIME, there is no need to encode binary data because DIME specifies the data length and type in the headers. Secondly, DIME processes messages faster and more efficiently. Unlike MIME, DIME uses data record lengths instead of separator strings to separate message parts. The parser then checks the data in the record headers to estimate the number of records in the message without having to read any record data.

In addition, there is no restriction on the content of a DIME record. While MIME limits its content-type specification to “text/html”, DIME supports both MIME content-type and those specified with the URI mechanism.