On 11/12/96 at 3:29 AM -0600, John Togasaki wrote:
But when the buffer is dropped on the attachment pane of our mail
client, we have control over how the data should be represented.
We could repackage the data and turn it into a multipart/digest,
where each of the dropped messages would be a message/rfc822
[...]
Ideally, other MIME-compliant mailers would also open multipart/digest
messages as mailboxes (however they represent open mailboxes) and would
be able to save them as mailboxes in their native format. What I would
like to know is how many mailers would handle multipart/digest in a
reasonable way?
This is exactly how we intend to implement this feature (it is not yet
done), and Eudora right now (at least on the Mac side; I forget whether the
Windows guys got this finished for 3.0), we handle it exactly as you
describe, with a mailbox attachment to the message, which the user can
double-click to open and look at all of the messages inside. I urge you to
implement it exactly this way.
The second (very similar) case is when adding a mailbox attachment from
the file system. Again, in this case, each message has a Unix From line
at the beginning of each rfc822 message. Should we convert it to a
multipart/digest or should we leave it alone and call it text/x-sun-mail-file?
Please, turn it into a multipart/digest. It is the perfect way to do this.
If we made it a multipart/digest, then they would lose the information
contained in the From headers when they receive it on the other end, but
more mailer clients may be able to read the messages as messages.
The envelope return path in the "From" header should already be in the
"Return-Path:" header of the message and the delivery date-time should be
in the topmost "Received:" header if your local delivery agent did the
right thing. As far as mailers being able to read the messages: If they're
not MIME mailers, they'll be able to read them without a problem. If
they're MIME mailers, they should treat the message/rfc822 as text and
therefore should do reasonably. In any case, some of us will handle them
*much* better if they're in multipart/digest form.
pr
--
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated
Work: (217)337-6377 / Fax: (217)337-1980