Something that knows enough MIME to recognize that there is a multipart
but does not let you do anything with it seems absurdly broken. It should
at least let you look at it as if it were text and/or save it in a file.
Donald
The SuperTCP mail system does just that. When it encounters a multipart
that it does not understand (like multipart/signed) it treats it as
multipart/mixed per the spec. Likewise, for currently unrecognized content
types like application/moss-signature one has the option to save them to a
file, again as per the spec.
In Bob's particular case, he has found a minor problem :-) with the
multipart logic which doesn't find the boundary parameter if it is not the
first parameter. So, in Andrew Young's message it worked as expected (the
boundary parameter was the first), however, in Mark Feldman's message it
did not (the boundary parameter was the third). In any case, the entire
message is still viewable by saving to a file.
Sorry to take up everyone's cycles on this but I hope this clears things
up.
On Mon, 18 Sep 1995 Jueneman(_at_)gte(_dot_)com wrote:
The technical feature of this specification is to allow
non-security-aware
MIME implementations to handle objects which are signed but not
sealed.
That is, cleartext is still accessible.
Thank you for this clear description. I must, however, press this
issue.
One of the technical arguments that was presented against the multipart
security specification is that, in fact, non-security-aware MIME
implementations would not correctly handle a multipart message
construct
that they had not seen before, effectively rendering the cleartext
inaccessible. So, I think it's fair to ask the larger audience:
Is there a proscribed behaviour for handling a new multipart construct
?
What do current MIME implementations do in this situation ?
All I know is that my MIME application, Frontier Technolgies Super-TCP
for
Windows v. 4.0, email version 3.70, doesn't handle multipart messages at
all.
It recognizes that there is an attachment, but can't process it. So I
can't
read any of the multipart messages that people send from time to time.
(this is not necessarily an endorsement for either approach, just a
statement
of current, quasi-brain-dead fact.)
Bob
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Engineering Manager for Advanced Products
Frontier Technologies Corp.
Email: Ray(_at_)FrontierTech(_dot_)com
Voice: (414) 241-4555 x205
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