One example: A side conversation with Ray Langford from Frontier
Technologies indicates that their SuperTCP mail client flattens hierarchy
and treats mp/alternative as mp/mixed. It also treats the first inline
text part as the message body that is presented to the user. The result
of these choices is that both our encodings result in the same appearance
to the user.
Terry
Yes, this is the way our Email works. We chose to do this because our mail
system is MAPI compliant. The MAPI structures define a notetext and flat
(no hierarchy) attachments. We currently treat a MIME message as an equal
collection of parts (attachments) and attempt to find a notetext (the first
text part).
I agree that mp/alternative could be handled better by only keeping and
showing one alternative (of the users choice through configuration) but
there are a number of reasons why this could be problematic in our current
MAPI compliant mail system. We are looking into this and also
Content-Disposition as ways to address these issues.
However, in retrospect, SuperTCP MIME Email has been shipping now for over
21/2 years (over 200,000 copies) and we haven't received a single complaint
about how we handle mp/alternative :-). I also don't think that there are
many people (programs) that create mp/alternative messages... yet :-).
[Sorry to readers if I have wandered too far off the topic (I am on
vacation and actually have time to read and respond to the list).]
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Ray C. Langford
Engineering Manager, Advanced Products
Frontier Technologies Corp.
Email: Ray(_at_)FrontierTech(_dot_)com
Voice: (414) 241-4555 x205
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