Re: Use of multipart/digest

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

On 11/12/96 at 3:29 AM -0600, John Togasaki wrote:

>But when the buffer is dropped on the attachment pane of our mail
>client, we have control over how the data should be represented.
>We could repackage the data and turn it into a multipart/digest,
>where each of the dropped messages would be a message/rfc822
[...]
>Ideally, other MIME-compliant mailers would also open multipart/digest
>messages as mailboxes (however they represent open mailboxes) and would
>be able to save them as mailboxes in their native format.  What I would
>like to know is how many mailers would handle multipart/digest in a
>reasonable way?

This is exactly how we intend to implement this feature (it is not yet
done), and Eudora right now (at least on the Mac side; I forget whether the
Windows guys got this finished for 3.0), we handle it exactly as you
describe, with a mailbox attachment to the message, which the user can
double-click to open and look at all of the messages inside. I urge you to
implement it exactly this way.

>The second (very similar) case is when adding a mailbox attachment from
>the file system.  Again, in this case, each message has a Unix From line
>at the beginning of each rfc822 message.  Should we convert it to a
>multipart/digest or should we leave it alone and call it text/x-sun-mail-file?

Please, turn it into a multipart/digest. It is the perfect way to do this.

>If we made it a multipart/digest, then they would lose the information
>contained in the From headers when they receive it on the other end, but
>more mailer clients may be able to read the messages as messages.

The envelope return path in the "From" header should already be in the
"Return-Path:" header of the message and the delivery date-time should be
in the topmost "Received:" header if your local delivery agent did the
right thing. As far as mailers being able to read the messages: If they're
not MIME mailers, they'll be able to read them without a problem. If
they're MIME mailers, they should treat the message/rfc822 as text and
therefore should do reasonably. In any case, some of us will handle them
*much* better if they're in multipart/digest form.

pr

--
Pete Resnick <mailto:[e-mail]>
QUALCOMM Incorporated
Work: [phone] / Fax: [phone]