[Imap-protocol] question on BODY[n.MIME]?

[Mark Crispin]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, Bill Janssen wrote:
> It seems that Thunderbird expects BODY[n.MIME] to return the entire
> MIME part, while I think the spec says to return only a set of
> headers, and only those headers specified in the MIME spec
> ("Content-Type", "MIME-Version", "Content-Transfer-Encoding",
> "Content-Id", and "Content-Description").  In any case, TBird
> seems to be building the message which it displays using the
> headers as the body content!

The BODY[n.MIME] specification returns the entirety of the MIME part 
mini-header; there is no list of "headers in the mini-header to include 
and header in the mini-header to exclude."  Note that MIME-Version is 
normally not in the mini-header.

If Thunderbird is really behaving as you say, then it is so broken that it 
is unusable.  Not that Thunderbird has ever impressed me as being IMAP 
clueful (it hasn't); but I suspect that you have misinterpreted what it 
actually does simply because it can't possibly work (even poorly) if it 
assumed that the body part content was included in BODY[n.MIME].

The protocol snippet that you provide seems to indicate the server 
is performing properly.  I'll note that the message is malformed in that 
the TEXT/PLAIN is missing the mandatory CHARSET.

My suggestion is that you try your server against a known IMAP-clueful 
client (such as Pine or Alpine, hint hint).  That way, if there are 
interoperability problems, it is much easier to diagnose.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
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