MIME was developed for sending attachments with emails because SMTP was incapable of carrying attachments.
MIME addressed this limitation by splitting the attachment into multiple parts or multiparts.
MIME multipart is used to encapsulate attachments and package them with the SOAP message. The code example demonstrates an attachment, which is packaged into a SOAP message as a MIME multipart. In a multipart header, Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding specify the type and encoding style of the part, respectively. The Content-id identifies and references that part.
DIME is also used to send attachments in a SOAP message. DIME has the following advantages over MIME:
There is no need to encode binary data in DIME.
DIME is faster and more efficient in processing messages. The parser checks the data in the record headers to estimate the number of records in the message without having to read any record data.
There is no restriction on the content of a DIME record.