attaching or inlining? what to do when you're stuck with a stupid mail client???[A

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Shachar Shemesh wrote:

> I think I can do that. What I suggest:
> Attachments must be either .diff or .patch. If you want, they can be bz2 
> or gz compressed. Mime type is disregarded. Also, the mail must be 
> non-HTML (or, at least, must have a text only component). Emails that 
> don't qualify are bounced.

Yes, historically there are few such emails, so there will be few
bounces.  Another way of looking at it is that since they are so rare, 
we can just let them through without any processing, I'm sure someone 
on the list will reply to it.

I think this is better aproach: just don't do any processing on
messages that are 'strange'.

> Emails that do qualify are checked. If the mime type is "text/plain", 
> and the extension is .diff or .patch, the mail is passed through.

Well, I'd say that is the attachment looks like text (regardless of
the mime type), simply inline the patch. Once again, an inline patch 
is so much better, one can easily reply to it, etc.

> If the email has a different mime type, or is compressed, it will be 
> extracted and uncompressed. If it has an HTML component, it will be 
> stripped. It will then be remailed (this time passing the filter, as it 
> is text only).

No need to strip anything. As I said above, let's simply ignore
messages with more than one attachment. They are far and few in
between, I don't think they are a problem.

-- 
Dimi.