Introduction

GMime is a library for parsing and creating messages using the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) format. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) so you are free to develop your Free Software applications using GMime without having to spend anything for licenses or royalties.

The primary author and maintainer of GMime is:

• Jeffrey Stedfast fejj@ximian.com

GMime is essentially an object-oriented application programmers interface (API). Although written completely in C, it is implemented using the idea of classes and callback functions (pointers to functions).

GMime is built upon another library called GLib which also serves as the foundation for such libraries as the GIMP ToolKit (Gtk+). GLib is mostly a portability layer but also contains additional functionality such as hash tables, linked lists, etc. For more information on GLib, you should see the API reference at http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/glib/index.html.