On February 8, 2002 at 13:59, "Morse, Richard E." wrote:
What if the text/plain message is merely a message saying "I'm sorry, but thi
s
message cannot be displayed in you mailer. The actual message has been attac
hed
as an HTML message." -- This has happened.
Live with it.
Seriously, this is extremely bad behavior of the MUA. The sematics of
multipart/alternative is to have each part be reasonable *alternatives*
of each other. With the example you provided, this is not the case.
The MUA should have not bothered with using multipart/alternative and
just set the main Content-Type to text/html. The receipient's MUA will
be responsible for telling the receipient if the MUA is unable to
render the data received.
Also, if the main type was text/html and the receipient's MUA was
MIME aware but did not support text/html, it would still show the
raw HTML text. This is desired fallback behavior of a MIME-aware
MUA when encountering unknown text media types. I.e. The MUA
would treat the data as text/plain for purposes of displaying the
message to the user.
IMO, it is unreasonable to have MHonArc try to deal with such
a situation.
--ewh