Michelle asked,
| I would love to have a service that allowed someone to send email to
| an address, and have it reply back with a message saying whether it
| was a plain text message or not (easier part) and a temporary URL
| which presents the message in raw form so the person can see what
| their message looks like to non-html mailers (harder part).
It would be fairly easy to set up an autoresponder in procmail that extracts
any header lines beginning "Content-" or "MIME-", indents the entire body by
one space to prevent MIME-interpretation of the separators and the parts'
inner headers when it gets back to the tester, and changes the inequality
signs to, say, braces to prevent HTML-rendering when it gets back to the
tester. I'd offer to do it if I had the authority anywhere to run up the
bandwidth and to create local addresses that don't begin with my username.
The autoresponder wouldn't have to guess whether the message is plain text
or not; it would simply show the tester how it would look in a plain-text
MUA. And it wouldn't be much harder instead to generate a name for a URL,
store it there with "<pre>" and "</pre>" around it (not all browsers, I'm
told, honor a ".txt" extension as such), return the URL and the expiration
date to the tester, and have a cron job remove any that are not to be
available any longer.
Hmm. I suppose that if there are no Content-anything or MIME-anything
headers and no left-side angle brackets, the autoresponder could say simply,
"Yes, your message is in plain text." Maybe not, though; who knows what
awful encoding will show up in email next? Better to let them see for
themselves.
However, there still is the concern Charlie brought up that people will do
it right in their test messages and then do it wrong a moment later when
they post. I was thinking that one way to get around that is to recommend
that they carbon or blind-carbon the testing address on their submissions.
