Re: Worried about MUA's and multipart/*

[[e-mail]]

Laurence,
I think this is the fault of early implementations rather than of
MIME itself; I note the example from RFC 1343, the original
.mailcap file format:

  Thus, if the message  has  a
            Content-type line of:

                 Content-type:  multipart/mixed; boundary=42

            and the mailcap file has a line of:

                 multipart/*; /usr/local/bin/showmulti 
                   %t %{boundary}

            then the equivalent  of  the  following  command  should  be
            executed:

                 /usr/local/bin/showmulti multipart/mixed 42

MH is a pain to configure for multipart processing (or I haven't
found the magic bullet yet....), but I don't think that's a general
thing across all implementations.

I don't think this is part of the MIME spec, or any standards-track
thingummybob, but we might want to think of writing a "MIME style guide",
kind of "RFC 1343 revisited", that could say things like:

- Some MIME things need to chew whole multiparts
- Parsing of some MIME objects give other MIME objects; be prepared
  for recursive invocation or "here's it coming back"
- Why you shouldn't use spaces in boundaries even if it is allowed

I'm sure the list is endless, but some list may be better than no list.
Volunteers?

           Harald A