Meta: useless text/plain part [Was: Ethernet - Internet I/O]

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On May 3, 2009, at 2:28 PM, Jerry wrote:

> On Sun, 3 May 2009 16:30:16 -0300
> Exemys <exemys at exemys.com> wrote:
>
>> This is a message in multipart MIME format.  Your mail client should
>> not be displaying this. Consider upgrading your mail client to view
>> this message correctly.
>
> What is this all about?

Exemys' mailer is broken.  Here are the details:

Exemys sent mail that was of type

   multipart/alternative

meaning that each part is an alternative view of the content.   
However, exemys' mailer doesn't actually do what it should and the  
part that was text/plain just had the text that we saw while the other  
part (presumably text/html) had the real content.

Mailman, the mailing list system used for the list, correctly cuts out  
text/html parts of multipart/alternative messages and just sends on  
the text/plain alternative to the list members.

So the problem is that the original poster's mail headers falsely  
claim that the parts are genuine alternatives while in fact the text  
part is just a notice to read the other alternate.

Mailman is behaving correctly in my view, stripping out any HTML  
alternates and just going with the text/plain alternative.  Exemys'  
mailer is broken in that it sends messages that claim to provide a  
text/plain alternative, but doesn't actually honor that claim.

Cheers,

-j


-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/