Why is MIME hard?

Why is MIME hard?

[Girish Kulkarni]

I know this has been asked here many times before, but I'd be glad if
someone explains in a less esoteric manner.

I recently started reading my mail in Emacs and tried VM in XEmacs
21.4 and Rmail in GNU Emacs 21.1.1. While I have settled on Rmail for
last couple of weeks I found that the lack of MIME support was
bothering me.

 0. How can I receive messages with MIME? (Attachments, HTML
messages, ...)
 1. How can I send messages with MIME? (basically attachments)

The oft-quoted page http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/~trey/emacs/mime.html
seems to have stopped existing and I have been through the Emacs MIME
manual. But the real reason for posting this here is my inability to
guess a philosophy behind making MIME so hard in Emacs. Can't it be
any simpler? Also, someone commented on comp.mail.mime that I had to
"let go of Rmail and use Gnus or Mew instead" if I wanted MIME. Is
that really so?

--
Girish Kulkarni - Allahabad, India - http://girish.50webs.com

Re: Why is MIME hard?

[Reiner Steib]

On Thu, Sep 27 2007, Girish Kulkarni wrote:

> Also, someone commented on comp.mail.mime that I had to "let go of
> Rmail and use Gnus or Mew instead" if I wanted MIME. Is that really
> so?

Gnus and MH-E support MIME.  I'm not sure about Rmail and Mew, but
IIRC this is correct.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Why is MIME hard?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc>
> Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:15:54 +0200
> 
> Gnus and MH-E support MIME.  I'm not sure about Rmail and Mew, but
> IIRC this is correct.

Rmail includes only rudimentary support for MIME: it only works with
messages that use MIME in the body; attachments are not supported.  So
it's of a very limited usability, if you need to read a lot of email
messages with attachments.

Re: Why is MIME hard?

[Dmitri Minaev]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2104 bytes --]

On 9/27/07, Girish Kulkarni <geeree@gmail.com> wrote:
> I know this has been asked here many times before, but I'd be glad if
> someone explains in a less esoteric manner.

I'll take the opportunity to add a couple of questions :).

In the last couple of weeks, I've been playing with Wanderlust. It
supports MIME using FLIM and SEMI libraries. My impressions are
positive as of yet, in spite of the discouraging complexity of the
whole set of packages, but I had some problems with MIME messages.

Say, I receive a message with the following MIME structure (as seen in mutt):

1 <no description>                 [multipa/alternativ, 7bit, 9.0K]
2 ├─><no description>        [text/plain, quoted, koi8-r, 0.8K]
3 └─><no description>        [text/html, quoted, koi8-r, 7.9K]
4 image001.jpg                        [image/jpeg, base64, 104K]

First, the message was retrieved partially, but later I re-fetched it
completely and the cached copy is complete. However, Wanderlust shows
only parts 1, 1.1 and 1.2. Part 2 is not seen. Is this a bug in FLIM
or am I missing something?

Another message, which I wrote in WL, looks like this (irrelevant
headers omitted):

=====================
User-Agent: Wanderlust/2.14.0 (Africa) SEMI/1.14.6 (Maruoka)
FLIM/1.14.6 (Marutamachi) APEL/10.7 Emacs/23.0.0 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
MULE/6.0 (HANACHIRUSATO)
MIME-Version: 1.0 (generated by SEMI 1.14.6 - "Maruoka")
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Return-Path: dmitri.minaev@sgs.com
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 24 Sep 2007 13:03:05.0159 (UTC)
FILETIME=[3EE7CD70:01C7FEAB]

Спасибо.
=====================

When I open this message in WL, the actual text is simply missing.
Could it be because of the wrong Content-Transfer-Encoding? How do I
fix it?

Emacs: "GNU Emacs 23.0.0.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll
bars) of 2007-08-13 on cera"
Wanderlust: "Wanderlust/2.14.0 (Africa)"
FLIM: Version 1.14.6 (Marutamachi)
SEMI: Version 1.14.6 (Maruoka)
APEL: Version 10.7


Thank you.


-- 
With best regards,
Dmitri Minaev

Russian history blog: http://minaev.blogspot.com

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Re: Why is MIME hard?

[Stefan Monnier]

> The oft-quoted page http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/~trey/emacs/mime.html
> seems to have stopped existing and I have been through the Emacs MIME
> manual. But the real reason for posting this here is my inability to
> guess a philosophy behind making MIME so hard in Emacs. Can't it be
> any simpler? Also, someone commented on comp.mail.mime that I had to
> "let go of Rmail and use Gnus or Mew instead" if I wanted MIME. Is
> that really so?

I believe the reason is just that there hasn't been much work on Rmail.


        Stefan

Re: Why is MIME hard?

[Tim X]

Girish Kulkarni <geeree@gmail.com> writes:

> I know this has been asked here many times before, but I'd be glad if
> someone explains in a less esoteric manner.
>
> I recently started reading my mail in Emacs and tried VM in XEmacs
> 21.4 and Rmail in GNU Emacs 21.1.1. While I have settled on Rmail for
> last couple of weeks I found that the lack of MIME support was
> bothering me.
>
>  0. How can I receive messages with MIME? (Attachments, HTML
> messages, ...)
>  1. How can I send messages with MIME? (basically attachments)
>
> The oft-quoted page http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/~trey/emacs/mime.html
> seems to have stopped existing and I have been through the Emacs MIME
> manual. But the real reason for posting this here is my inability to
> guess a philosophy behind making MIME so hard in Emacs. Can't it be
> any simpler? Also, someone commented on comp.mail.mime that I had to
> "let go of Rmail and use Gnus or Mew instead" if I wanted MIME. Is
> that really so?
>

I use VM with no real problems. However, to your wider question, I think
the problem is that the MIME standard seems to be open to interpretation or
some some vendors just ignore the standards. For example, I regularly get
HTML e-mail messages that do not rendor correctly. However, when you look
at them, almost 100% of the time, they violate some aspect of the MIME
standard (at least in my interpretation of the standard - and I guess that
proves part of my point). Recently, I have had problems with Apple mail
attachments, but they appear to be doing some strange stuff with their
attachment handling (it is embedded inside the html part of the mail
message - so if your configured like me to prefer the text version, you
can't easily access the attachment (this is fixed in dev VM)).

As the standard seems to be open to interpretation and as some vendors just
ignore it anyway, writing and maintaining a mail reader that is able to
read all the various formats and which is maintained in a timely manner and
can keep up with new versions/interpretations etc, is not a trivial task. 

I run mew and VM and find that they do OK. The latest version of VM seems
to handle apple mail attachments (Mew still seems to have problems). 

I guess the issue isn't so much that it is hard, but mrore that there are
not enough people available for all the various mail readers supported
under Emacs to keep all of them up to date. I don't know what the situation
is with rmail, but believe it can be configured to handle nearly all 'well
defined/implemented' mail extensions, but possibly won't handle those that
are not MIME compliant (in the stricter sense). 

Tim

P.S. Please don't encourage HTML mail - it is a curse that should be
forever relegated to the "Bad idea" bin!


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Why is MIME hard?

[Reiner Steib]

On Sun, Sep 30 2007, Tim X wrote:

> Recently, I have had problems with Apple mail attachments, but they
> appear to be doing some strange stuff with their attachment handling
> (it is embedded inside the html part of the mail message - so if
> your configured like me to prefer the text version, you can't easily
> access the attachment (this is fixed in dev VM)).

Are you talking about attachments (e.g. images) inside
multipart/related MIME parts?  If so, what Apple mail is doing is
correct.  Cf. `gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed' in Gnus:

,----[ (info "(gnus)MIME Commands") ]
| `gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed'
|      Display "multipart/related" parts as "multipart/mixed".
| 
|      If displaying "text/html" is discouraged, see
|      `mm-discouraged-alternatives', images or other material inside a
|      "multipart/related" part might be overlooked when this variable is
|      `nil'.  *Note Display Customization: (emacs-mime)Display
|      Customization.
`----

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo---  |  PGP key available  |  http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: Why is MIME hard?

[Tim X]

Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:

> On Sun, Sep 30 2007, Tim X wrote:
>
>> Recently, I have had problems with Apple mail attachments, but they
>> appear to be doing some strange stuff with their attachment handling
>> (it is embedded inside the html part of the mail message - so if
>> your configured like me to prefer the text version, you can't easily
>> access the attachment (this is fixed in dev VM)).
>
> Are you talking about attachments (e.g. images) inside
> multipart/related MIME parts?  If so, what Apple mail is doing is
> correct.  Cf. `gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed' in Gnus:
>
> ,----[ (info "(gnus)MIME Commands") ]
> | `gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed'
> |      Display "multipart/related" parts as "multipart/mixed".
> | 
> |      If displaying "text/html" is discouraged, see
> |      `mm-discouraged-alternatives', images or other material inside a
> |      "multipart/related" part might be overlooked when this variable is
> |      `nil'.  *Note Display Customization: (emacs-mime)Display
> |      Customization.
> `----
>

The attachments I was referring to in my case were word documents. From
memory, they were not multipart/related. I'm no expert on the MIME
standard, but various groups I asked this question on and posted examples
said that what Apple Mail was doing was not forbidden by the standard, but
it was an unusual interpretation. 

From memory (and its been a while since I looked at one of these messages,
so I could be wrong), the atachment was inside the text/html part and was
not marked as multipart/alternative.  I did try opening it with gnus, but
this failed. I also tried it with mutt, but that failed as well. gmail was
able to give me the attachment. Note however, as I don't normally use gnus
for mail, the inability of gnus to access the attachment could easily be
due to mis/lack of ocnfiguration. 

Tim



-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au