RE: E-Mail with text and HTML

[Trevor Joerges]

Title: RE: E-Mail with text and HTML

Larry,

In my experience the Outlook client doesn't handle this type of e-mail the way you would expect it to. But many other MUAs do. I have written a command line mailer that sends messages in the appropriate format (freely available from my web site below and 100% Perl compiled using Perl2Exe). The key being a main boundary content type of either "multipart/mixed" or "multipart/alternative" along with a couple other MIME headers "Content-Disposition" and "Content-Transfer-Encoding".

The message appears fine with text first followed by an inline HTML document in Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger, Lotus Notes and Eudora but Outlook 2000 for some reason places the text in the body and makes the HTML an attachment. I've even tried modifying mail formatting in Outlook to HTML, RTF and text to see if it renders the message differently and it doesn't.

I can't with 100% certainty point the finger at Outlook because I got fed up with testing but thought I'd just share my experience.

 

Regards,

Trevor J. Joerges
<http://members.home.net/tjoerges>
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-----Original Message-----
From: Larry E Stewart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: February 16, 2001 10:13 AM
To: Perl-Win32-Web Mailing List
Subject: RE: E-Mail with text and HTML

I have looked at messages with text and HTML, but cannot find the secret of exactly what needs to be sent to an SMTP server.  I see that all text and HTML messages have in the header that there is a boundary between the text part and the HTML part (i.e. your message contained Content-Type: multipart/alternative;\r\nboundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C096CF.674118D0"), but when I use this type of header and and try to separate the body of the e-mail into two parts with a boundary between them, it still doesn't work for me.  I end up with all text or HTML.  Does anyone know the details of what exactly needs to be done to send a multipart text and HTML message?

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 1:45 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: E-Mail with text and HTML

Take a look at the message I sent today with the subject: "RE: Automatically Submit HTML/ASP Forms (fwd)".

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry E Stewart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 10:37 AM
To: Perl-Win32-Web Mailing List
Subject: E-Mail with text and HTML

I use a script that connects to an SMTP server via a socket connection, and
then sends e-mail in HTML format.  I have seen e-mail that contains both
text and HTML.  The text will show in the preview pane of Outlook and then
when you open the e-mail you will see the HTML message.  Can anyone tell me
what I need to do, or a good reference, so that I can modify my script to
send both text and HTML in an e-mail?

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