Re: multipart/alternative question
On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 09:19:14AM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 15 at 11:59 PM, quoth lee:
> >> You can also use the %X sequence in your index_format definition to
> >> display the number of attachments in a message. However, I don't
> >> think either of those methods pick up on inline attachments.
> >
> > Hm, I would expect that attachments are attachments and count as
> > such ...
>
> The definition of "attachment" is not as clear as you would think. For
> example, we tend to think of MIME components whose type is text/* as
> not being "attachments", but sometimes they can be (e.g. if I sent you
> a txt file).
Yeah, but mutt already has a way of showing a list of attachments. I
would simply count every entry in that list as an attachment. It
doesn't matter to me if a part is designated as inline --- other than
"inline" is confusing because when something is described as "inline",
one would think that it is inline and not an attachment.
If you have used the mail client built into Mozilla, it would
distinguish between forwarding messages inline vs. as attachment. And
inline was actually inline, while attachment was attachment.
So what's the difference between "inline" and "attachment"?
> Here's a wacky message structure my mom sent me (using Apple Mail):
>
> I 1 <no description> [multipa/alterna, 7bit, 653K]
> I 2 |-><no description> [text/plain, utf-8, 2.0K]
> I 3 `-><no description> [multipa/mixed, 7bit, 651K]
> I 4 |-><no description> [text/html, quoted, windows-1252, 3.0K]
> I 5 |->Typeface Ideas.pdf [applica/pdf ...]
> I 6 `-><no description> [text/html, 7bit, us-ascii, 0.2K]
>
> I haven't set up attachment detection properly, so %X says this
> message has 0 attachments.
All the attachments of this message are designated inline. But you can
even set
attachments +A */.*
attachments +I */.*
and mutt doesn't count attachments that are inline. (Imho, there's no
such thing as an "inline attachment". Something is either attached or
inline, and it cannot be both. Creating mails with inline attachments
is silly.)
> Details of how this works and why it's hard are here:
> http://www.mutt.org/doc/devel/manual.html#attachments
This doesn't explain why inline attachments aren't counted even when
you make them qualify as attachments?