[OFB Cafe] Climatology vs. Climatism

[Derek Broughton]

On July 26, 2008 20:46:55 Patrick Shanahan wrote:
> * Derek Broughton <auspex at pointerstop.ca> [07-26-08 19:41]:
> > On July 26, 2008 20:25:12 Fred A. Miller wrote:
> > > Yes.....Rick's are the ONLY ones that are "blank."
> >
> > Not to me - which I suspect is something to do with the fact that I
> > explicitly instruct my mail program to show _only_ text/plain parts, and
> > his are multipart.
>
> Mutt has an option to reset the content-type.  If I change it to
> text/plain, I can view his posts.  Also removing the content-type
> header will allow viewing.

Ah, now this is interesting.  This particular message (the last one from Rick 
in this branch of this thread), has first a "multipart/mixed" content type.  
That says a capable program should display _all_ the parts.  But the first 
part is, itself, multipart/alternative - so a program should choose _one_.  
The first of those parts is a message, but the second (which I've included in 
full) is empty (a blank line following Content-Type ends the header, then 
there's one blank line of message).  Finally, the second part of the 
multipart/mixed is presumably added by Mailman, as it's a list .sig.  

In a multipart/alternative, I believe each program is free to choose which it 
displays, and the only difference in the headers seems to be that one says 
it's 7-bit and the other specifies Mime-version.  I suspect if I tweaked my 
settings slightly, KMail would choose the other part, and I'd stop seeing 
Rick's messages, too.

From rwbowers at gmail.com Sat Jul 26 09:11:09 2008  
... [none of these headers matter ]
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
  boundary="===============1871503939=="
...
--===============1871503939==
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; 
	boundary="----=_Part_3496_12286536.1217074270031"

------=_Part_3496_12286536.1217074270031
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
...
------=_Part_3496_12286536.1217074270031
Content-Disposition: inline
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"


------=_Part_3496_12286536.1217074270031--


--===============1871503939==
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

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-- 
derek