Just for fun, I did some digging for "content-disposition: inline" in
my April archives.
What I found:
Mozilla 4.51 uses it for forwarded messages - without filename.
Novell Groupwise 5.5 uses them on a SINGLE-part message
message - without filename.
Lotus SMTP MTA (Internal build v4.6.2, and others) uses them on a
single-part message without filename.
A more interesting example is what a Lotus SMTP MTA (probably the same build)
did to a multipart message. Content-disposition inline for multiparts?
Content-type: multipart/mixed;
Boundary="0__=GT4D6kwm4SS7ntBH6vf0MmbyUG4Vjt0gsOTahntmbzlBMm7VJU8CPx8V"
Content-Disposition: inline
Sender: owner-ipp(_at_)pwg(_dot_)org
--0__=GT4D6kwm4SS7ntBH6vf0MmbyUG4Vjt0gsOTahntmbzlBMm7VJU8CPx8V
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
Mozilla 4.08 is able to generate the following for an attached GIF:
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="26879.gif"
(in context it made SENSE to have the attachment viewed inline; it's small)
Mulberry (Mac) 1.4.2.1 uses it (without filename) on single-part messages.
Mozilla 4.51 also generated an attachment that *I* wouldn't have had
inline with the following:
Content-Disposition: inline;
filename="ntpserver.patch"
Some version of HP OpenMail generated the following quite bizarre
combination for a multipart:
Part 1:
Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="1.txt"
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="1.txt"
Part 2:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="Re:"
I don't know the intent of the sender.
Some version of Mail*Hub (TurboSendmail?) X.400->SMTP gateway added
a "Content-disposition: inline" (no filename) to its single body part.
Finally, just for laughs, this came out of some spammer's engine:
--------------51A269FA31DF
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1; name="2dollars.htm"
Content -Transfer - Encoding: quoted -printable
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="2dollars.htm"
Content-Base: "file:///C|/My%20Documents/Project/2dollars.htm"
==============================================================
Conclusions?????????????????????????
- A lot of stuff will attach "Content-disposition: inline" to single-part
messages under some, still unknown, conditions.
- Some stuff will inline all body parts, and seems to be consistent in doing
so; it's not clear that this represents the user's intent, or is being
honored by the recipients' MUA.
- One fairly rare mailer (sorry, HP) generates "text of message" body parts
that contain a filename in its "content-disposition: inline" header.
Very unscientific sample, of course; I found 87 messages with
"content-disposition: inline" in my April archive (out of 2.529), and 3 of
them had a filename attached to them.
All the usual caveats apply; this is what msgs looked like when they came
to me.
And I didn't check very hard for counterexamples, either.
Harald A
--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Maxware, Norway
Harald(_dot_)Alvestrand(_at_)maxware(_dot_)no