230119 - multipart-alternative message problems with some mailers: text/html comes before text/plain.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 574989

(MailNews Core :: MIME, defect)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

multipart-alternative message problems with some mailers

some mailers, when sending messages with multipart-alternative attachments, send
the text/plain and text/html parts in the wrong order.

according to rfc 2046, they should be sending the "best" part last (plain, then
html), but some mailers do the reverse.

I'll attach a sample .eml message that shows this.

Let's hold off on fixing this bug.

this might not need to be fixed, if the mailer that does this gets fixed.

(unless someone else knows of another mailer that does it.)

Comment 1

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

note, OE seems to handle this case.

Comment 2

[Daniel Nilsson]

I entered comment #6 for bug #234547:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=234547#c6 , any change the issue I
explained there could be related to this issue ?

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 246341 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

xref bug 198565, bug 130119.

Comment 5

[Michael]

Attachment: example email with reverse order

This attached email exhibits this problem, and was broken by the attached
signature from a mailing list by the ezmlm mailing program. In this situation
mozilla takes the last plain text alternate while outlook express takes the
first. This means that if mozilla is set to display in html it will find the
alternate parts in the wrong order.

According to RFC 1341 ( http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1341.html ):

    NOTE:  From an implementor's perspective, it might seem more
    sensible  to  reverse  this  ordering, and have the plainest
    alternative last.  However, placing the plainest alternative
    first    is    the	  friendliest	possible   option   when
    mutlipart/alternative entities are viewed using a  non-MIME-
    compliant mail reader.

The reason for the order is for mail programs that cannot handle html content
and display both parts with all the garbage html as well. It is better for the
email recipient if the more readable plain text message is before the html
garbage so the order is important for composing the message. Since mozilla can
display html content I think it should handle reverse order as this does not
conflict with the intention of the RFC's.

Comment 6

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Guys this might have been fixed by bug 351224. Could you take a few minutes and download the latest nightly ( http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-central/ ), backup your profile and test and let us know if this is fixed or not ?

Comment 7

[raal]

Not fixed.
Linux, TB 11.0a2 - When open example, I see only last part of the message, not full message.

Comment 8

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Removing myslef on all the bugs I'm cced on. Please NI me if you need something on MailNews Core bugs from me.

Comment 9

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Clearly a duplicate of bug 574989.