Subject: Odd multipart usage to watch out for

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 17:27:56 -0500

This morning someone sent me an event from Microsoft Entourage
(the calendar/and mailer?] in MS Office 2001 for Mac), and I
noticed something odd: it contained an iCalendar object, but it
was attached as multipart/alternative rather than
multipart/mixed.  The result is that, if your MUA doesn't
recognize text/calendar, you'll just see the text/plain; you
probably won't have the opportunity to save the text/calendar to
a file and give it to your CUA by hand.

Furthermore, the text/calendar comes *before* the text/plain.
This means (according to RFC-2046, section 5.1.3) that the
text/plain is a more faithful rendition of the information, and
the text/calendar should be ignored if you know how to handle
text/plain--which, of course, everybody does.  The upshot is that
*nobody* who correctly implements MIME can see the iCalendar
information coming from Entourage; if you want your MUA to be
able to accept it, you have to put in a special hack to deal with
it.

Just wanted to pass it along for people who work on MUAs, or CUAs
that have to read the user's mail, or some such.

--
/===============================================================\
|John Stracke    | http://www.ecal.com |My opinions are my own. |
|Chief Scientist |==============================================|
|eCal Corp.      |Whose cruel idea was it for the word "lisp" to|
[email-masked]|have an "S" in it?                            |
\===============================================================/

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From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 14:50:04 -0800

At 17.27 -0500 01-02-22, John Stracke wrote:
>text/plain--

No, it's the other way around. You should render the _last_ bodypart 
which you understand.

Section 5.1.4 (multipart/alternative) says:

>In general, the best choice is the LAST part of a type supported by 
>the recipient system's local environment.

    paf

-- 
Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>                         Cisco Systems
Consulting Engineer                                  Office of the CSO
Phone: (Stockholm) +46-8-4494212            (San Jose) +1-408-525-8509
        PGP: 2DFC AAF6 16F0 F276 7843  2DC1 BC79 51D9 7D25 B8DC

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 10:54:49 -0500

> No, it's the other way around. You should render the _last_ bodypart

Right, that's what I said (or tried to say, anyway :-).  The Entourage
message contains first the text/calendar and then the text/plain.  Since
everybody understands text/plain, and it's last, it will always be the
last one you understand.

--
/==============================================================\
|John Stracke    | http://www.ecal.com |My opinions are my own.|
|Chief Scientist |=============================================|
|eCal Corp.      |What if there were no hypothetical questions?|
[email-masked]|                                             |
\==============================================================/

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From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 08:44:30 -0800

>everybody understands text/plain, and it's last, it will always be the

Sorry, I misunderstood. We say the same thing then.

Anyway, I loaded my mail I have in Eudora  (865MByte in 565 
mailboxes) in Entourage, and issued a global search. After 5 minutes 
on my G3 Powerbook during which time the PB was frozen, I saw a 
message in the lower left corner which said "5651233 messages to 
search out of 5651233". The number to the left then decremented with 
one every 2 seconds (the number 5651233 probably was something else, 
but it was _large_).

I had to go into MacsBug to get rid of the program.

I stayed with Eudora.

    paf