On Sun, 14 Oct 2007 11:17:48 +0900, James Edward Gray II wrote:

> Here is the relevant header from the message you are discussing that  
> shows why it wasn't gated:
> 
> Content-Type: 	multipart/alternative;  boundary="---- 
> =_Part_28483_17627615.1192285743535"

I just checked out your "What is the ruby-talk" gateway; I didn't realize
that the gateway currently dropped multipart/alternative.  That's a shame.

Since I bear some responsibility for its evil popularity, I'll volunteer to
update that gateway code to extract the text-part out of the multipart if
you can send it to me...

I should point out, though, that (a) it's really not that hard (text/plain
is supposed to come first, so that even clients who didn't understand MIME
would display the right thing before displaying the wrong thing) and that
(b) SpamAssassin doesn't actually assign any points for HTML e-mail - or,
more accurately, it assigns zero points.

You say that "Some e-mails would be pretty non-trivial to handle
correctly", but I'd be curious to see examples of those; by definition,
multipart/alternative contains a number of equivalent parts, and as long as
one of those parts is text/plain, you only have to extract that part.  That
was the whole point of sending multipart/alternative, rather than merely
sending text/html and forcing people to downconvert.  If there are clients
that send multipart/alternative, but don't send a text/plain subpart,
they're missing the point.

-- 
Jay Levitt                |
Boston, MA                | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://www.jay.fm         | - Kristoffer