On Oct 29, 2007, at 9:20 AM, mortee wrote:

> James Edward Gray II wrote:
>> I've been looking into this a little this morning.
>>
>> We do receive multipart/related messages, though they seem fairly
>> uncommon compared to multipart/alternative.  They don't appear to be
>> gated properly.  In fact, the mailing list archives don't even  
>> seem to
>> show them.  For example 271796 was a multipart/related message and I
>> can't find it in the archives or on comp.lang.ruby.
>>
>> To understand what we are dealing with here, I read:
>>
>>   http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2387.html
>>
>> This type does not seem easy to deal with and I open to  
>> suggestions for
>> the best strategy to use.
>
> AFAIK it's mostly used for HTML messages with images embedded in the
> email itself.

Yeah, I think that's what I'm seeing in my analysis of the messages.

> I guess it would mostly be one part of a multipart/alternative  
> message, of which one alternative should be text/plain anyway.

Most of the cases I have found have a multipart/alternative section  
inside the multipart/related section, like this example shows:

   271796:  multipart/related ()
     multipart/alternative ()
     image/png ()

Obviously I need to extend my statistics gathering script to handle  
the nesting, but I've checked this message by hand and there was a  
text/plain part in there.

> Otherwise, you're most likely left with HTML to
> strip, and images which you may either drop or attach to the output as
> files.

Right.  Which means I still need to settle on an HTML strategy as well.

> Sorry if I happen to be wrong on one point or the other.

The other usage that seems common, more common than the HTML case in  
fact, is as part of a signed message:

   271822:  multipart/signed ()
     multipart/related ()
     application/pgp-signature ()

I've not yet checked to see if these messages are gated properly with  
our current setup.

James Edward Gray II