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Re: not all attachments shown in pager



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On Wednesday, December 24 at 10:13 AM, quoth Rejo Zenger:
>>> Aah. That makes sense. In a more simplified rendering:
>>>
>>>  1          multipart       mixed
>>>  2 ├─>              text            plain
>>>  3 └─>              message         rfc822
>>>  4   └─>    multipart       alternative
>>>  5     ├─>  text            plain
>>>  6     └─>  multipart       mixed
>>>  7       ├─>        text            html
>>>  8       ├─>        multipart       appledoubl
>>>  9       │ ├─>      application     applefile
>>> 10       │ └─>      application     msword
>>> 11       └─>        text            html
>> 
>> That seems to work reliable. Setting multipart/alternative as the first 
>> possibility to alternative_order makes it show the other part of the 
>> message. Now, one last question, is it possible to have mutt show all 
>> attachments in the pager, regardless of alternatives?

No. Mutt follows the MIME decoding guidelines pretty strictly, and the 
message you've outlined above has *explicitly* marked the text/plain 
component as completely and fully equivalent to the subsequent 
multipart/mixed component. Mutt considers the message's structure to 
be essentially gospel for the purposes of rendering: if it's 
displaying one of several equivalent alternatives, there's *no* point 
in displaying *anything* from the other alternatives.

This is *usually* a good thing. A frustratingly common thing that is 
done is that people will send emails where the html version has a 
background graphic and extra graphics for a border and a header and 
maybe a footer (and maybe more!), and these things are all really 
irrelevant to the content of the message and would only be confusing 
if they appeared listed in the pager. In these (rather common and 
typical) cases, it is important that these other "attachments" are not 
displayed when I display the text/plain component.

Now, it's quite possible to get *some* idea that there are other 
attachments when in the *index* view rather than the pager view. You 
can list the number of attachments with %X in the $index_format (how 
mutt decides whether a MIME segment is considered a countable 
attachment or not is described at length in the mutt manual, if you 
want details on how to change that). You can also use %X in 
$pager_format, to put the same information in the status bar along the 
bottom.

>> I don't need all of them to be rendered, but to know other parts of 
>> the message contain more content is usefull.

Well, here's the thing: the MIME structure of the message *explicitly* 
states that the other parts of the message DO NOT contain additional 
useful content, but merely contain the exact same (read: "equivalent") 
content in an alternative format. The message may be flat-wrong (it 
wouldn't be the first message to be encoded in a broken way), but at 
the moment, mutt doesn't have good ways of working around explicitly 
erroneous MIME structures.

~Kyle
- -- 
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
                                                         -- Oscar Wilde
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