ietf-mta-filters
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Re: Working Group Last Call: draft-ietf-sieve-body-00.txt

2005-03-28 12:29:52

Hi Nigel,

--On March 28, 2005 15:36:30 +0100 Nigel Swinson <Nigel(_dot_)Swinson(_at_)rockliffe(_dot_)com> wrote:

   For example, a document with "multipart" major content type only
   directly contains the text in its epilogue and prologue section;
   all the user-visible data inside it is directly contained in
   documents with MIME types other than multipart.

I don't think this is terribly clear.  For one thing I think it implies
you can't have nested multipart messages, which you can (send an
attachment with alternative content type).  I think it may be best
illustrated using an example.  I suggest:

   For example, suppose we have the following message:

     From: Whomever
     To: Someone
     Date: Whenever
     Subject: whatever
     Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=1234

     This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

     --1234
     Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

     Hello

     --1234
     Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"

     <html><body>Hello</body></html>

     --1234--

   If the body test was used with :content specification "multipart",
then we would     find the string "This is a multi-part message", but we
would not find "Hello", as     Hello is in the direct contents of the
text/plain and text/html body parts, but only     indirectly in the
content of the multipart/alternative body part.

How about using an example like the following for extra clarification (copying the approach from rfc2015 PGP/MIME):

----

Example:

      From: Whomever
      To: Someone
      Date: Whenever
      Subject: whatever
      Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=1234

&      This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
&
      --1234
      Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

$      Hello
$
      --1234
      Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"

%      <html><body>Hello</body></html>
%
      --1234--
&
&      This is the end of the MIME multipart.

In the above example, the '&', '$' and '%' characters at the start of a line are used to illustrate what portions of the example message are used in tests:

- the lines starting with '&' are the ones that are tested when a 'body :content "multipart/alternative" :contains "MIME"' test is executed.

- the lines starting with '$' are the ones that are tested when a 'body :content "text/plain" :contains "Hello"' test is executed.

- the lines starting with '%' are the ones that are tested when a 'body :content "text/html" :contains "Hello"' test is executed.

- the lines starting with '$' or '%' are the ones that are tested when a 'body :content "text" :contains "Hello"' test is executed.

----


--
Cyrus Daboo