We study formal properties of smooth max-information, a generalization of von Neumann mutual information derived from the max-relative entropy. Recent work suggests that it is a useful quantity in one-shot channel coding, quantum rate distortion theory and the physics of quantum many-body systems. Max-information can be defined in multiple ways. We demonstrate that different smoothed definitions are essentially equivalent (up to logarithmic terms in the smoothing parameters). These equivalence relations allow us to derive new chain rules for the max-information in terms of min- and max-entropies, thus extending the smooth entropy formalism to mutual information.