Subject: Interoperability problem with ECSMail and Pine

From: Steve Hole <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1993 13:25:17 -0600

We have found a small interoperability problem between ECSMail and
Pine that we believe to be a bug in Pine.  It appears that Pine is
sensitive to character case in the Type and Subtype fields of a
multipart attachment. 

For example, a text file attachment with the type/subtype
combination of "TEXT/plain" will correctly display, but a
the type/subtype combinations of "TEXT/PLAIN" and "TEXT/Plain"
will not.   Editing these fields by hand in a message file 
will allow you to recreate this error in a consistent way.

By our understanding of the MIME spec, case independent 
comparisons should be made.   We are going to change ECSMail
to canonicalize outgoing Type/subtype pairs to Capitalized
words eg. Text/Plain.   

Cheers.

--
Steve Hole  		        Director of Research and Communications
ISA Corporation			mail:  [email-masked]
Suite 835, 10040 - 104 St.      phone: (403) 420-8081
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada       fax:   (403) 420-8037
T5J 0Z2

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 20:04:54 -0700 (PDT)

Steve,
We've been unable to reproduce the case sensitivity to MIME types that 
you observed; however, we did just find a bug wherein Pine refused to
display a text attachment if the charset spec was missing.  This will be 
fixed in the upcoming release.

If you could send as an attachment a msg that demonstrates the
case-sensitivity bug we can investigate further.  (There must be some
combination of message characteristics that trigger the bug for you but
not us.)

-teg

p.s. What's the latest estimate for the next ECS release?