[Alpine-info] Sending multipart/alternative messages from pine?

[Lucio Chiappetti]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Joshua Miller wrote:


> This is going to sound like a silly request/question, but is there a

> way (even if a bit complex) to send multipart/alternative messages

> from alpine (with one part text/plain, and one text/html).


The question is not silly ... it's the reason :-)


> I've got to deal with a stupid recipient mail server that rejects

> text/plain emails with "invalid body type".


That's actually the *silliest behaviour* I've ever seen !!
Forcing people to use a stupid and redundant e-mail format :-(

Consider that I generally FILTER e-mail I receive in 
multipart/alternative, scrubbing out the html part and replacing it with a 
one-line placeholder (but I do not delete the original, I store it offline 
for a week). All this is done via procmail 
http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/Procmail/noquotenohtml.html

Anyhow are you really sure they want a full-fledged multipart-alternative, 
and not just a body tagged as text/html ? Or the presence of a text/html 
attachment ?

In the first case, I'd play with the "Customized Header" in .pinerc adding 
a Content-Type (you could even define a Role according to the recipient 
address, which generates a customized header pre-filled with Content-Type: 
text/html).  Then it's up to you whether to write the mail body in plain 
text, inserting <p> tags, or just wrapping it all in <pre></pre>.

In the second case just write your normal e-mail and attach (control-J 
from main header) ANY html file (my inclination would be to add a 
"stupid.html" file which tells them how stupid they are :-) ).

I just tried that, apparently it generates a multipart/mixed message.
I do not believe it is much different from a multipart/alternative (I read 
the RFCs long ago, but I was interested in decoding such messages to get 
rid of the HTML part, not in encoding them).

I have no idea how easy it would be to generate a real 
multipart/alternative. I'm pretty sure I could do it writing the 
appropriate stuff (headers, separators and bodies) to a file and sending 
it straight with sendmail, but I'm not sure if pine will send a 
pre-composed attachment of the correct format without other modifications.

Good luck.

-- 
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Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
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