[pmmail-list] PMMail is (will become) OpenSource MALFORMED MESSAGE

[Dr. Jeffrey Race]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004 10:26:14 -0800, Tim Roberts wrote:
>No, his message is not malformed.  This is a correctly formatted 
>multipart MIME message.  The message body prior to the first MIME 
>boundary is ignored by a MIME-aware mailer (such as PMMail).  Many 
>mailers will insert something like "If you are reading this, your mail 
>program does not understand MIME", but leaving it blank is perfectly valid.
>The real meat of the message is in the text/plain part

Hi Tim,

Thanks for calling my attention to the imprecision of my terminology.
In fact  RFC 2046 indeed states:

 "There appears to be room for additional information prior to the first
  boundary delimiter line and following the final boundary delimiter line.
  These areas should generally be left blank, and implementations must
  ignore anything that appears before the first boundary delimiter line 
  or after the last one.

  NOTE: These "preamble" and "epilogue" areas are generally not used
  because of the lack of proper typing of these parts and the lack of
  clear semantics for handling these areas at gateways, particularly 
  X.400 gateways. However, rather than leaving the preamble area blank,
  many MIME implementations have found this to be a convenient place
  to insert an explanatory note for recipients who read the message
  with pre-MIME software, since such notes will be ignored by 
  MIME-compliant software."

However like many internet users I never employ a MIME-compliant 
client because I don't want all the html and virus cr** that comes
with it.  

Mike has reconfigured his mail client not to send html and now
everything is perfectly readable.

FYI on html, everyone is invited to read
<http://www.camblab.com/nugget/htmlmail.pdf>

Jeffrey Race
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