On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 03:59:19PM -0500, David DeSimone wrote:
> Carlos Puchol <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > well, but attachments have a comment field or something
> > because i can see the name of the file being sent.
>
> That's just a filename. MIME attachments also have a "Content-Type"
> header which is supposed to tell the MUA exactly what type of document
> is contained, and thus the mailer should know what to do with it.
>
> If the content-type is "text/plain", but the filename matches "*.gif",
> for instance, then the mailer that *sent* the message is clearly broken.
> It's not Mutt's fault that it tries to display an image as a text
> attachment, because that's what it was told by the sender to do!
>
> You should complain to the person who sent you the mail, and tell them
> to fix their mailer so that it sends things out correctly. That will
> help everyone.
Yes, you are right, but...
Have you actually tried telling someone who sends you mail like that
that their mailer is broken? I have, on many occasions, a couple of
them recently. It's an eye-opening experience.
In one recent case, the author had absolutely no idea what I was talking
about when I discussed the Content-Type header of her message. All she
knew was that Outlook could send files, so she attached a file to her
message and sent it. And of course it looked fine to everyone in her
office, since they were also using Outlook. She was actually quite
willing to fix the problem, but hadn't a clue where to even begin. And
never having used Outlook, I couldn't really help her. I even had a
fairly knowledgeable person here look into this and he couldn't find
anything on the subject in his Outlook reference manual. (It's still an
open issue.)
Anyway, thanks to Microsoft there are broken mailers out there that
aren't going to be fixed. We should still try to enlighten users and
try to get these mailers fixed or replaced. In the mean time, however,
it would be nice if mutt had a way to work around this problem. I hate
the thought of making mutt as brain-dead as Outlook w.r.t. mail headers,
but being a bit more forgiving in what it accepts would make mutt a more
useful mailer.
Maybe there could be some sort of consistency check between the
Content-Type and the file name and if they disagree, process the message
according to one or the other, the choice set by some quadoption
variable (kind of like how reply_to works).
--
Gary Johnson | Agilent Technologies
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | RF Communications Product Generation Unit
| Spokane, Washington, USA
