Subject: html mail?

From: Tony Tung <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 10:41:41 -0700 (PDT)

Hi,

I recently received an HTML encoded email which pine did not render using
its html filter.  Instead, the message was displayed along with its tags.
The key difference between this email and another which was rendered as
expected was a line in the header "Mime-Version: 1.0".  In fact, when I
added this line to the incorrectly-rendered email's header, it worked
fine.

Is this a bug or a feature?

Thanks,
Tony

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From: Jacob Morzinski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 23:33:28 -0400 (EDT)

> Is this a bug or a feature?

It is a bug for a HTML message to lack a Mime-Version header.

It is a feature for a mail reader to assume a message is plain text
if the message is not properly labeled as anything else.  Lack of a
Mime-Version header means that the message was not properly labeled.

Sincerely,
 Jacob Morzinski                                [email-masked]

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From: Tony Tung <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 23:49:04 -0700 (PDT)

> Mime-Version header means that the message was not properly labeled.

Ah, I see.
Is there some RFC or documentation concerning this that I can present to
the sender of the mail?

Thanks.

---

From: Jacob Morzinski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 May 2002 03:44:31 -0400 (EDT)

> Is there some RFC or documentation concerning this that I can present to

The most directly relevant documentation is RFC 2045, the MIME
specification.  Section 4 specifies:

   Messages composed in accordance with this document MUST include such
   a header field, with the following verbatim text:

     MIME-Version: 1.0

Most mail readers know how to decode MIME-compliant messages, but
a message that doesn't even _label_ itself as mime-compliant is
certainly not compliant.

(A Content-Type header by itself isn't good enough because there is
more than one type of Content-Type headers, _even for email_, and the
mail reader doesn't know which way to interpret the header until told
that the message is MIME.)

Regards,