Great Circle Associates List-Managers
(April 2001)
 

Indexed By Date: [Previous] [Next] Indexed By Thread: [Previous] [Next]

Subject: appending to multipart/alternative messages
From: Omar Thameen <omar @ clifford . inch . com>
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 17:22:12 -0400
To: list-managers @ GreatCircle . COM

[Resending because I forgot to obfuscate the list command words.]

Greetings:

I'd really like to make sure that every message that is sent out on
lists that I host has a footer (aka trailer) message which gives 
unzubscribe information.  The problem is that in multipart/alternative
messages (RFC 1521), each of the parts is an "alternative" version of
the same information.

The gist is that when you add MIME part to the end of the message, 
that's the only thing that gets displayed because of the way MUAs
are supposed to parse the various parts.  

Specifically, the parts are displayed in increasing order of complexity,
and the MUA is supposed to start from the end and work backwards,
displaying the first that it can.  When you add the text/plain part
at the end, the MUA displays that and stops, since all MUAs should
support text/plain.

So my question is whether anyone has dealt with this situation or has
any suggestions.  The options I see are hackish and unsatisfying:
1) Adding the footer to all parts of the message.  You'd have to limit
   this to text/plain, text/richtext, and text/html.
2) Changing the MIME encoding to text/multipart and adding the footer.
   This means that the recipient will view all versions of the message.

Omar





Follow-Ups:
Indexed By Date Previous: Re: Microsoft and data ownership
From: murr rhame <murr@vnet.net>
Next: Re: appending to multipart/alternative messages
From: James M Galvin <galvin@acm.org>
Indexed By Thread Previous: Re: Microsoft and data ownership
From: murr rhame <murr@vnet.net>
Next: Re: appending to multipart/alternative messages
From: James M Galvin <galvin@acm.org>

Google
 
Search Internet Search www.greatcircle.com