At 8:41 PM -0500 2/26/02, Stefan Jeglinski  imposed structure on a 
stream of electrons, yielding:
>I'm helping a Windows user with something: she is receiving html 
>e-mails with little gif attachments in them, but if you look at the 
>raw html, I see img src tags with notations like:
>
>cid:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>I'm wondering if these have some e-mail significance because of the 
>smtp.mindspring.com. Anyone know what these are? Are they embedded 
>attempts to get information clandestinely sent to a mail server 
>somewhere?

No. See RFC2387 and RFC1873

In brief, the multipart/related MIME type exists so that a message 
can have multiple parts that refer to each other, most commonly used 
in the case of HTML messages with their inline images included as 
other parts of the message instead of referencing external sources. 
This works far better than multipart/mixed and hoping that the 
interpreter of the message understand the message itself as a sort of 
base 'directory' under which all the referenced images exist, 
especially given the problems of naming across platforms.

A part of a multipart MIME message can have a Content-ID of the same 
form as a Message-ID, being (in theory) globally unique and made up 
of a domain part and a local part. A Message-ID form is a subset of 
the legal forms for e-mail addresses. The possible application of 
Content-ID's and cid: references to them is a lot broader than 
multipart/related messages with the main part being HTML and the 
others being images, but that is by far the most readily understood 
and most widely used application.
-- 
Bill Cole                                  
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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