Supragal Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 Anyone an expert that can explain it in the words of a human?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeordieSteve Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 Can you paste the header up and let us know what you want to know? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobSheffield Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 *resists temptation to explain in terms of emails and mime artists* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supragal Posted June 18, 2007 Author Share Posted June 18, 2007 Ok, so I think half the problem is that I don't really know what I need to know.... Background is I support an application that can generate emails. We have had a support call come through saying this (it makes no sense in english words) "multipart mixed or should it be alternative for the MIME header. This is showing both HTML and Text in email client." So I think he is saying that his emails contain the same information twice in diff formats?? Or is my wild guess miles off? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chilli Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 MIME is just a way of saying how the content is encoded, there are many types - the mime setting should match the data so for example an email might contain html and be text/html mime so that when the email client reads it, it knows what to do with the data and how to display it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supragal Posted June 18, 2007 Author Share Posted June 18, 2007 so it could be that his weird email program is expecting an obscure type? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sdavies Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 Yeah, two formats. Plain text and HTML in a multi-part mail message. It seems as though they are saying that they are getting both rendered in the email client. This can either be a buggy out of spec email client, not interpreting the headers correctly - or the software spitting out the email is generating inappropriate boundary mark-up, so in stead of stopping at the correct spot, the email client carried on reading the plain text included with the blob of data that came through. This can also be down to mail servers molesting data on the way through essentially corrupting the expected boundary marker - blurring the edges of the data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supragal Posted June 18, 2007 Author Share Posted June 18, 2007 Well he's using Thunderbird so I'm suspecting it's something his end. All our other customers (that I know of) are on Notes or Outlook with no issues at all. I'll get him to send me a screen shot of the email not working it might make it clearer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supragal Posted June 18, 2007 Author Share Posted June 18, 2007 The plot thickens... Our application sends 'reports' as a pdf. He's asking about this now too: "incorrect MIME type being used on email reports. It sends the PDF as a application/octet - stream rather than a correct application/PDF MIME type." I have NOOOO clue what he is on about. I'm so good at my job I've googled the terms but they jusst confuse me more Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 application/octet is a generic type of encoding. Many things can be encoded like that but you wont know what they actually are unless you can work it out from a file extension. application/PDF is telling you explicitly what it is, so the receiving mail client knows to open it using an app registered on the client machine as being able to open PDF files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivan Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 We had issues reading pdf's from clients with some of our staff too. A while ago we had been experimenting with Thunderbird and it was those staff having problems. Never did find an answer though. We put them back on Outlook. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supragal Posted June 18, 2007 Author Share Posted June 18, 2007 Ivan, that's really useful to know as it makes it look very specifically related to their email client rather than our app. Any money no-one has every defined which email clients we support exclusively though mawby- been reading up more about this, it's a .pdf file so it's pretty obvious. What you are saying is that the email client doesn't know what to tell the client machine to use to open it? So why does Outlook know to open it as a pdf using that format and thunderbird doesn't? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 You tend to find Mozilla like to stick to the rules whereas Microsoft bend them whenever they please to achieve what they want. I don't know for sure but I'd guess that the standards for MIME encoding do not include working out what a file is by its extension. Therefore if something is application/octet encoded the email client should really look on the client machine for a program registered as being able to open that encoding, which if there was one would probably be a generic binary/HEX file editor of some kind. I dunno for sure though, I've never really looked into it. (You could read that as "I'm guessing") Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supragal Posted June 18, 2007 Author Share Posted June 18, 2007 So it wouldn't be a bad thing to encode it as a different type like application/pdf application/x-pdf application/acrobat applications/vnd.pdf text/pdf text/x-pdf it would still work with outlook etc? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mawby Posted June 18, 2007 Share Posted June 18, 2007 As your current encoding is application/octet, you wouldn't want to use any of the text/ formats as that wouldn't be correct. But I would have expected application/pdf to work with both Outlook and Thunderbird. (Only one way to find out ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supragal Posted June 19, 2007 Author Share Posted June 19, 2007 Yeah try and talk the developers into it, can't imagine that will happen!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sdavies Posted June 19, 2007 Share Posted June 19, 2007 Yeah try and talk the developers into it, can't imagine that will happen!! You'll find they aren't all that bad That sort of "feature" request would more than likely sneak itself easily into an interim release without too much hassle (depends how stretched they are and if they are in a high-resistance period). If in doubt, flutter your eye lashes at em? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Supragal Posted June 19, 2007 Author Share Posted June 19, 2007 They are in Australia... so it's a bit far to flutter lol If they see a value in it versus the effort to do it and test etc then they would... we will see, I've posed the question, see where it gets me... Thanks for the help guys, this place rocks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now