Re: [Pan-users] Re: Strange message reading error

[Per Hedeland]

walt <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>On Wed, 08 Aug 2007 23:39:20 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
>
>> Over on news.povray.org in the povray.binaries.images group, there's a
>> message with a subject line "Problem: Finding the elevation range of an
>> isosurface relief" (Message-ID is
>> <address@hidden>) that doesn't seem to
>> read properly in 0.132 (or 0.131 come to think of it) - it's a
>> multipart/mixed message type with multiple attachments, but the text
>> portion never shows up in the message pane.
>
>Here is the "body" of the message:
>
>This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
>--------------030002070204040903040404
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>High!
>
>During the last months, I experimented with various isosurface
><snip>

And the "toplevel" headers have this MIME info
MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
 boundary="------------030002070204040903040404"

>
>Appears to me that the "body" of this post is really the first attachment
>of five, the last four being jpegs.

This is the way MIME works - the term "attachment" is really a misnomer
in the MIME world, MIME doesn't have attachments, it has multipart
messages such as this one (which is a different thing than the
"multiparts" we often talk about in the pan context) - in typical
"attachment" usage as shown here, the overall Content-Type is
multipart/mixed, with the first part being Content-Type text/plain and
containing the text that the user composed, and the other parts
"something else" (or they can be text/plain too if you "attached" text
files of course).

The text that appears before the boundary line, here "This is a
multi-part message in MIME format.", is intended for non-MIME-capable
user agents to display something vaguely useful to the poor user -
MIME-capable user agents discard it.

Another common multipart usage (without "attachment") is the text + html
with the "same" content in both - overall multipart/alternative, first
part text/plain, second text/html. And the *most* common "attachment"
usage is probably a combination of the two (the multipart concept can be
arbitrarily nested): Overall multipart/mixed, first part
multipart/alternative with text/plain and text/html "subparts", second
and subsequent parts "something else".

>  What I do think is a bug:  the first
>attachment (which just happens to be text/plain) is not saved along with 
>the jpegs.

If I asked pan to "save attachments" for that message, I would *not*
expect that first text part to be saved. However the complaint was that
the text part was not *displayed* in the message pane, this I too would
consider a bug - sorry, I haven't verified that.

>I use my own (unbranded) build of Thunderbird as my everyday mail client
>and I've not noticed any such oddities in the mail I send with attachments
>but I will do some testing to see if I can reproduce this result.

If by "oddities" you mean that the text is the first part in a
multipart/mixed message, I'm sure you will find that all your messages
with text and "attachments" are formatted like that.

And btw, filename suggestions are not normally given with the "composed"
text part.

--Per