--On Tuesday, June 27, 2006 5:10 PM -0400 Dave Koontz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Unfortunately, in our environment, "inline" images do get extensive use
from our users (College Students, Faculty). Much of their email is for
entertainment value, and many email "jokes" make use of Inline images of a
variety of file types. GIF and JPG are just two types, you will also see
PNG, BMP, etc.
My company manufactures and assembles products and inspects items on
receipt at the dock. When damage is found, including quality issues from
our vendors, we photograph the item and email it to them so that they can
immediately start to address the issue and get it fixed before the next
day's shipment leaves their facility. Often a message requires a series of
photos and explanatory text. Photographic email is a real requirement of
business correspondence.
I'm no fan of HTML in email, because it's so easy to use it to hide spam
and malicious material in. I advocate strict syntax checking (which alas
would fail the most common HTML-generating MUA's), and restriction of HTML
to the subset needed to do this kind of job.
Others have mentioned needing to include an HTML part to "contain" the
image part. I personally attach my images to a text/plain part with a
multipart/mixed, with the image set to disposition:inline. No HTML part is
included, but I can see how one might need one for multiple images with
interleaved comments, as a text/plain part has no mechanism to do that.
My question is how to smack the biggest supplier of MUA's (the one in
Redmond) to produce a sufficiently limited subset of HTML so that we as
email admins can properly do our job while still allowing users to use a
reasonable subset of markup.
