RE: mime implementation (nested bodyparts)

["Dr. Mark K. Joseph" <[e-mail]>]

1. Emissary 2.0 handles the viewing of arbitrary nested bodyparts.  It
is different in that it does not flatten the nesting out.  It shows
the next level down as an icon.  When the user clicks on that icon
the user's entire view of that message changes to the next level down.
That is we do not open up another window.  The user can move up and
down the message by pressing an "Up" button to move up in the message
and clicking nested icons to move down.

2. Emissary usually will show all parts of a multipart/alternative
except in the case where their is only a text/plan and a text/html
bodyparts.  Here it will just show the text/html.  In showing the
user all the bodyparts we put up a small notice telling the user
what is going on.  We chose this approach because on a PC there is
no way for the mail/web client to know of all the installed viewer
software the user may have.  So if we don't have a built in viewer
the user can select some other program he knows of.

3. We automatically generate nested multipart/mixed messages for forwarded
messages.  We preserve all content-types of a forwarded message, so
if it contains a multipart/alternative then we perserve that, but we
do not generate mutlipart/alternative, parellel, or disgest by ourselves.

4. We also translate ALL message/external bodyparts into clickable URLs,
including mail-server.  With a mail-server we generate a mailto WITH
parameters.
This way the body of the message, as well as its subject can be
automatically
set by the mailto.  We however, show the generated message to the user
before we send it out so that he can decide what to do with it.

5. And contrary to what the Netscape Web pages says today Emissary also has
full HTML support in its mail and news clients.  In fact we had this support
way before Netscape had it.  In addition, we fully support MULTIPART/RELATED
with "cid:" links from a text/html bodypart to bodyparts inside the same
message for images and all embedded objects (e.g., gifs, word documents).
Such a message can be composed by grabbing a page off the web or from
scratch
in the compose window.  The Emissary mail compose window is a full HTML
editor.