[SpamCop-List] Re: Dubious FAQ entry 166.html

[Frank Ellermann]

Steven Maesslein wrote:
 
> Most mailers describe what you (correctly ) call "forward as
> message/rfc822" as "forward as attachment".

That's sloppy, and a major difference from the receiver's POV.

Some abuse desks claim that they don't accept any attachments,
and a message/rfc822 simply is not necessarily an attachment -
OE insists on it, other mailers don't.
  
The default Content-Disposition is "inline" (= no attachment).

If the receiving MUA has no clue how to display some obscure
MIME type "inline" it can and will of course treat it as an
attachment.  But all MUAs supporting MIME know how to display
a message/rfc822 "inline", this is a _mail_ .  If a MUA can't
display a _mail_ it's no MUA but something else (e.g. Outlook
is a calendar and no MUA, but I disgress... ;-)
 
> Saing anything else is going to confuse user's who don't know
> the difference betweem the two.

Sloppy terms are more confusing.  How would you interpret it
if an abuse desk wants "no attachments" ?  Does this mean that
they want no message/rfc822 "evidence" (= spam waith complete
header) ?  Or no Content-Disposition: attachment ?  In both
cases, why don't they simply delete the offending header line
Content-Type: message/rfc822 or any stupid Content-Dispoition ?

Users have no clue how to do this if their MUA supports it at
all.  And if they try copy and paste to emulate a text/plain
it won't work in many cases, because they'd then run into all
kinds of clipboard and charset oddities.

The result of copy and paste with my MUA is what SpamCop used
to call "Netscape bizarro format" until I found out that it's
much better to use mail submissions.

So why not simply use message/rfc822, it's painless and also
guaranteed to be 100% correct - no chance to get it wrong at
the cost of one line Content-Type: message/rfc822.  Bye, Frank