Re: [Evolution] Attachment bug

[Ian Goldberg <ian cypherpunks ca>]

On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 09:21, Marc Billiet wrote:
> At 14:32 2002-02-07 +0100, Jan Mynarik wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > the attached message consists of 3 parts (plain text version of message,
> > HTML version of message and ZIP archive) but evolution (1.0.2 and
> > earlier) doesn't find (no attachment shown in message index or message
> > detail) the ZIP attachment (mutt does).
> >
> > Jan "Pogo" Mynarik
>
> I've tested your mail with Eudora and Staroffice (both on m$-windows). 
> Neither of them sees the attachment. Eudora shows your mail as one big 
> text, and Staroffice splits the mail in two parts: your mail, and the mail 
> from obchod obchudecek cz  They both contain the undecoded zip-file as part 
> of the text.
> So maybe it's a mutt-bug to see the attachment  ;-)
> Or a bug in the forwarding of Evolution.

The reason *you* can't see it properly is that Jan _attached_ the
message as a text/plain file, rather than _forwarding_ it as a
message/rfc822 message.  So the message that got posted to the list was:

- his message
- a plain text file containing the message he received

If you "save as..." the attachment, and incorporate that message back
into your inbox, you'll see the email message Jan received the way Jan
did.


Now: the reason Evolution doesn't show the .zip file in the *original
mail* is that it's not supposed to.  The message Jan received was a
multipart/alternative message, containing the three parts:

- text/plain
- text/html
- application/zip

A multipart/alternative message contains *several versions* of the same
message, in different formats.  The user agent is supposed to display
just the version it can display best.  For Evolution, that's text/html,
so it shows that.

That having been said, what kind of broken mailer *produced* this
message?  I have a feeling the application/zip part *isn't* just a
version of the same message, but it rather should have been a separate
attachment; most mailers would have constructed this message correctly;
i.e.:

A multipart/mixed message, containing 2 parts:
- a multipart/alternative message, containing 2 parts:
  - a text/plain part
  - and a text/html part
- and an application/zip part


   - Ian