Re: [Evolution] Message contents completely blank

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Sun, 2003-01-26 at 12:46, Stuart Luppescu wrote:
> I thought that the reason why one of my correspondents' messages were
> always blank was he was chronically hitting the Send button prematurely.
> (Actually, just the list subscribe/unsubscribe info prints.) But when
> other list subscribers started quoting this guy's messages, I began to
> wonder. When I looked at the raw message file on the server I found that
> there actually was some contents, but evolution in normal view, and
> email source view as well, displayed NOTHING. I assume his mailer is
> doing something weird -- or is it evolution's fault?

not evolution's fault, and I don't think it's mutt's fault either. I
believe that the mailing list software is at fault here.

>  Anyone know what's
> going on?

I can make an educated guess.

> Here's (what I guess is) the important stuff from one such message (did
> I leave out anything vital?):
>
> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i
> Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
> boundary="===============041141849442228207=="
> --===============041141849442228207==
> Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1;
>         protocol="application/pgp-signature";
> boundary="WIyZ46R2i8wDzkSu"
> Content-Disposition: inline
>
>
> --WIyZ46R2i8wDzkSu
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> Content-Disposition: inline
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
>
> Circa 2003-01-25 08:25:45 +0100 dixit xxxxxxxxx:
>
> : The problem with this is that pics or apps designed for 64x64 will
> : not gracefully scale down or up to other sizes. To make this work
>
> ...
>
> --WIyZ46R2i8wDzkSu
> Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
> Content-Disposition: inline
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (OpenBSD)
> Comment: See http://www.pobox.com/~xxxxx/keys/ for my public key.
>
> iD8DBQE+MyCTKJ/qqBOBFJERAjzbAJ90y7iuvRKMmsI17r/hblxvAOaT7QCdHyFy
> JY/q56B/8TQLTqrHsBhX43w=
> =cDqZ
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> --WIyZ46R2i8wDzkSu--
>
> --===============041141849442228207==
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> _______________________________________________
> INFO: https://windowmaker.org/lists/listinfo/wm-user
> ARCHIVE: http://windowmaker.org/lists/archive/wm-user/
> FAQ: http://windowmaker.org/faq.html
>
> --===============041141849442228207==--

I suspect that the *original* message as sent by mutt was the
multipart/signed, however the mailing-list decided to munge the entire
message by containing it within a multipart/mixed part (note that the
first content-type is multipart/mixed). Since the mailing-list software
did not terminate the header block before the start of the
multipart/signed content headers, those headers are treated as headers
of the message, thus "there is no spoo^H^H^H^Hmultipart/signed". 

Instead, we have a multipart/mixed with an extremely large preface (a
preface usually contains a message such as "The following is a multipart
message in MIME format, if you can see this then your mailer is not MIME
compliant blah blah blah").

so... the MIME structure we end up with is:

multipart/mixed
  text/plain

thus... Evolution displays it correctly. Someone else mentioned "this is
why I want to be able to toggle html mail off in Evolution". Well, that
wouldn't have helped at all because that's not even remotely related to
this problem.

For your convenience, here is what the MIME structure of the message
that mutt constructed probably looked like before being so hideously
corrupted by the mailing-list software:

multipart/signed
  text/plain
  application/pgp-signature

And here is what the mailing-list software was presumably *trying* to
create, but failing miserably:

multipart/mixed
  multipart/signed
    text/plain
    application/pgp-signature
  text/plain

I hope that explains it.

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com