Re: [Evolution] MS Rich Text support?

[Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>]

Dan Winship wrote:
> I'd been under the impression that TNEF was an entirely
> secret/proprietary format, but that seems to be less true now than it
> used to be. I couldn't find the "tnef2txt" utility you mentioned, but
> searching for "tnef" on Freshmeat turns up two other programs.
>
> So we definitely ought to be able to display it. I don't think we want
> to generate it. Anything that can display TNEF can display HTML, which
> is a much more widely-readable format.

Please do not support TNEF.

TNEF is not merely an encoding, it's a serialization of a complete MAPI
object, including OLE controls, and as such, you're not gonna ever be
able to generate them.  

It was very common to see TNEF messages in 1996 and 1997, but it's very
uncommon today, because Microsoft's products are all now capable of
generating and reading MIME and HTML.  

Convince your correspondents to turn on the preference that says "use
HTML" instead.  These documents explains how:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q138/0/53.ASP
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q241/5/38.ASP

Microsoft's own developer doc says "use MIME instead of TNEF if the
recipient supports it": 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/psdk/exchserv/backbone_767n.htm
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/psdk/mapi/appsmtp_38oj.htm

Also note -- if you see a message that contains a text part as well as a
TNEF part, chances are the TNEF part doesn't actually contain any
content you care about.  It's just extra cruft tacked on the end.


Generally I'm very much of the opinion that you should support receipt
of any kind of message in a mailer (I even supported SunMail attachments
in Netscape!  Not many people noticed), and only generate
standards-compliant ones, but in the case of TNEF, I don't think that's
a good idea. 

This is a case where the MS products *can* be configured to use the
standards.  It's much better to educate your correspondents who are MS
users to do this, than to let them perpetuate Micros~1's battle for
them.

There's nothing TNEF can do that MIME cannot do.

If you start going down the TNEF path, you're going to be chasing
Microsoft for the rest of your life.  This was their strategy to kill
off the MIME standard and thus own the message format.  They've pretty
much lost that battle at this point, but don't make it any easier for
them. 

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz jwz org             http://www.jwz.org/
jwz dnalounge com       http://www.dnalounge.com/