Re: [gmime-devel] What's the preferred way to retrieve message body?

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com>]

Junping Zhang wrote:
>
> Thanks a lot for the explanation!
>
> > The problem with g_mime_message_get_body() is that it made a lot of
> > assumptions about the structure of the message (meaning it was pretty
> > naive). Because of this, it wouldn't properly work on all messages.
>
> As Dirk mentioned in the earlier post, the body is obvious in 99% of
> cases.
> I would say that you can define the body part with a given email. I like
> the new API, but when you have time, if you can list the cases where body
> can't be clearly defined, it will be good information. Off hand, I can
> iterate the following (that's probably outside of that 99% :)):
>
>   1. Delivery-status Notification message
>      In this case, the first human readable part should be the body. The
>      2nd part being "message/delivery-status" and 3rd part
> "message/rfc822".
>
>   2. If the body is itself a "multipart/alternative"
>      I agree that we will need more API to decide on the appropriate
>      "body" to render.
>
>   3. A S/MIME encrypted message.
>      In this case, it's not multipart. But since "Content-Disposition"
>      will look like this
>         Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="smime.p7m"
>      I would consider it has empty body and one attachment.
>
> But other people might dice the same message differently, so the current
> API is better.
>
> - Junping
>


Part of the problem is that some mailers might split the body into
multiple text parts (for various reasons, such as trying to be fancy
about embedding images between paragraphs of text or whatever else w/o
resorting to using text/html).

Jeff