W3BNR wrote:
On 3/26/2015 3:15 PM, EE wrote:
W3BNR wrote:
I recently received an e-mail that was in two parts; one 'plain text' and the
other 'HTML'.
When viewing in HTML I saw one part and when viewing in plaint text I saw the
other part.
Message type in header was:
"Content-type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="Boundary_(ID_cKOPk/6CliG/Ro7OFuUArg)"
I would not have known that this was a two part message except that, for one
reason or another, I happened to look at the source. There is no indication of
multipart in the Mail display.
Is there any way of knowing beforehand that e-mail is multipart?
I can usually tell that because I read email as plain text, and there is usually
little or no useful content in the plain text part of multipart mail. Sometimes
there is a link to a web page, which is fine, but often not even that.
True, but I've gotten a couple where there are two completely different texts
about different subject matter. One in plain text and the other in HTML. Not
knowing that the e-mail was Multipart without reading the headers, I lost one or
the other text.
The sender expected me to know it was multipart. I had no inkling until he
asked me why I did not reply to the part I didn't read. I naturally told him
that I didn't get the e-mail. And then he explained.
If this is going to be the 'new' think in e-mail the e-mail programs should
start signifying that a msg is multipart.
Been on the internet forever and never thought to send something like that.
I don't think it's the "new thing" in emails. The plain text part is
supposed to reflect the same content as the HTML part, just without
formatting. There's no way to strictly enforce that, although I'm not
aware of a user agent which easily allows different content in each
part. IMHO, if someone does subvert that convention, they shouldn't
expect recipients to know!
Some webmail interfaces I've come across don't allow showing the plain
text part at all, and console-based UAs may not show the HTML part at
all. The idea is that both parts contain the same information, and the
receiving UA can show whichever is most appropriate.
I think I saw somewhere that some spam filters assign a higher spam
rating if the plain text is significantly different from the HTML part.
Apparently it was a trick used by spammers to subvert older filters
which only looked at the plain text part - put something innocent in the
plain text part, and the spam in the HTML part. Users are most likely to
see the HTML part, while the filters only checked the plain text part.
So putting different content in each part may increase the chance of the
message being blocked or filtered as spam.
Mark.
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