I have a question from a customer about messages apparentely generated by
"Novell Global MHS" and then sent through "SMTP for NGM" and finally
received by our product.
Sigh. I've seen it before, although I wish I hadn't. Given the number of sites
that have it now looks like I'm going to have to add support for this stuff to
our products.
It isn't MIME. Its sort of MIME-like, but that's all. It is in fact an
implementation of the fourth or fifth draft of the specification that
eventually became MIME, with the names of some of the headers changed. It is
also highly variable -- I've seen variants involving UUENCODE. (I shudder
to think of what it might use for quoted-printable.)
Mark Crispin recently pointed out that one of his contributions to MIME that
I neglected to mention was the regular parameter syntax. That came about in
the sixth draft, which this stuff predates, so you'll see bizzarre content-type
headers of the form:
content-type: multipart; 1-s; ifjeifjeifjeifjeifj
Does anyone know if this is generated by "Novell Global MHS" or by
"SMTP for NGM"? I am not familiar with either one (actually never
heard of them before).
I don't know exactly what is generating this stuff. All I know is that it
started appearing fairly recently. I am frankly amazed that a vendor could go
to the trouble of implementing something this complex without implementing
real MIME.
Ned