Ned,
You of all people should understand some of the compromises made in
order to deal with the existing infrastructure and old versions of
applications that took less than elegant approaches to some of these
problems. Sure, in a perfect world, and under configuration control, I
generate
multipart/mixed
multipart/alternative
text/plain
application/x-beyondmail
...other attachments...
But the fact is that there are several hundred thousand copies of our
product out there that I need to be able to communicate with and those
versions use the attachment name to indicate which attachment encodes
our custom information. I need to be compatible with those copies in
an environment where I don't have control over the gateway.
Terry