From: Craig A Summerhill (craig@cni.org)
Date: Thu Mar 04 1999 - 15:18:28 CST
This one is a bit odd. It seems to work fine, except I am not sure why
hypermail is performing the way it is...
If you look at either of these messages:
http://www.cni.org/Hforums/cni-copyright/1999-01/0088.html
http://www.cni.org/Hforums/cni-copyright/1999-01/0092.html
You will see that hypermail has marked up the body of the message as
an attachment:
o text attachment: stored
The trouble is that in the case of both of these messages, the thing that
is being stored as an attachment is simply ASCII text which could have
just as easily been marked up as HTML.
I am guessing that the reason it is doing this is because the headers of
the message contain a "Content-Type:" field. In fact, both of these
messages came from me and were generated using ELM. ELM predates MIME
by a decade, but it does insert "Content-Type: text" into the header of
the message. See the following header, for instance:
From craig@cni.org Thu Jan 14 04:18:35 1999
Received: from a.cni.org by b.cni.org (5.65v3.2/1.1.10.5/13Aug97-0713PM)
id AA04257; Thu, 14 Jan 1999 04:18:35 -0500
Received: by a.cni.org id <AA01576@a.cni.org>;
Thu, 14 Jan 1999 04:18:34 -0500
From: Craig A Summerhill <craig@cni.org>
Message-Id: <9901140918.AA01576@a.cni.org>
Subject: Re: Recipes?
To: cni-copyright@cni.org
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 04:18:33 -0500 (EST)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23]
Content-Type: text
What hypermail is doing isn't the end of the world, but there two problems
I have with it:
o It does cause an extra click for everybody to get to the message,
a minor annooyance
o Because the text of the message is stored in a "bin*" attachment,
a web crawler of local indexing app like SWISH-E is not going to
be able to index the text of the message.
This problem qualifies as a major inconvenience for me. On a
couple of lists we have, myself and other staff who use ELM
heavily are the primary posters to the list(s). We use these
lists as a news distribution services from our organization to
its members. We want to index these lists as part of our general
web site index, so that people can find press releases, etc.
The way hypermail is processing them, we're kinda screwed. If
I setup SWISH-E to index files containing the filename "bin*" I
run the risk of trying to index real binary files which will
cause SWISH to crash -- or worse, corrupt indexes...
I believe a preferred action in this case, would be to check for the
existence of the "Mime-Version:" header *first*. Then, if the
"Mime-Version" declaration is positve, check for "Content-Type:" and
MIME parts.
-- Craig A. Summerhill, Systems Coordinator and Program Officer Coalition for Networked Information 21 Dupont Circle, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 Internet: craig@cni.org AT&Tnet (202) 296-5098