Re: Stop it with putting your e-mail body in my MUA OT

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Wed, 10 Jul 2002 11:53:40 EDT, Leo Bicknell <bicknell () ufp org>  said:

> ] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> ] Content-Disposition: inline
> ] Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
>
> ] Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
> ] Content-Disposition: inline
>
> If your mailer isn't showing you the first one as a text/plain
> message, even if it doesn't understand the second you need a new
> mailer.

Amen.  If it's showing the text/plain as an attachment, even when there's a
'Content-Disposition: inline', the MUA is just being contrary to the point of
borkedness.  There *is* a corner case in the MIME specs in that if your MUA
doesn't support multipart/signed, it is required to drop back to multipart/
mixed - and at that point, the treatment of any given text/plain is unspecified
(an MUA is free to display all as attachments, all as inline, the first as
inline and rest as attachments, or whatever choice it feels like). This
ambiguity is why RFC2183 was issued in August 1997.

I've made a *partial* fix to exmh to force generation of a Content-Disposition
tag (it's still broken for the general case, but THIS message should have a
'inline' attached to the text/plain bodypart).  If it in fact isn't there,
let me know.  If it's there and your MUA now Gets It Right where it didn't
used to, let me know.  If it's there and your MUA *still* doesn't get it right,
let your vendor know - there's nothing else I can do about it.

If the exmh fix actually improves things for anybody, and doesn't break things,
I'll commit it to the CVS tree.
-- 
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Computer Systems Senior Engineer
                                Virginia Tech

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