On Oct 13, 2007, at 9:35 PM, Jay Levitt wrote:

> 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.

To be totally clear, our gateway doesn't drop them.  They are  
forwarded to our Usenet host.  Our host rejects them as invalid  
Usenet posts.

> 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...

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/hacking_the_gateway

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/mail_to_newsrb

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/news_to_mailrb

I have a rewrite in progress that uses TMail for message handling.   
On of my goals for this was to correctly separate the text portions  
of multipart/alternative.  I've just been distracted with work  
deadlines and other short term projects, so I haven't completed it yet.

> 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)

I've seen some pretty crazy things in messages sent to Ruby Talk.   
One of those is multipart/alternative with no text/plain component.   
I don't think there's too much loss in not supporting such setups  
though.

> and that
> (b) SpamAssassin doesn't actually assign any points for HTML e-mail  
> - or, more accurately, it assigns zero points.

My apologies.  I thought for sure I had seen a reference to that  
sometime in the past, but I've been unable to dig it up this  
morning.  I stand corrected.

James Edward Gray II