[kronolith] Incompatible Invitations (was: Reminders not conforming to RFC 2822)

[Jan Schneider]

Zitat von Otto Stolz <Otto.Stolz at uni-konstanz.de>:

> Hello,
>
> Jan Schneider schrieb:
>> You are probably talking about invitations sent to meeting   
>> attendees.  Neither IMP 3, nor Thunderbird can make any use of   
>> these invitations,  you need a mail client that does, like IMP 4.
>
> After having solved the sendmail problem (cf. my recent message),
> my messages comply with RFC 2822, viz. their lines are delimited
> with CRLF (not LF, as with the -- still faulty -- SMTP driver).
> However, that issue turned out to be a red herring: Still, the
> "attachment" is not displayed by conventional e-mail clients.
>
> A closer look at the message source has revealed the true issue:
> the MIME content-type is given as "multipart/alternative".
> This means that there is no attachment, at all. Rather, according
> to <http://rfc-ref.org/RFC-TEXTS/2046/chapter5.html#sub1sub4>,
> each of the body parts is an "alternative" version of the same
> information.
>
> However, the Kronolith invitation messages do not comply with
> thise RFC-2046 semantic. Rather, the first part essentially
> refers the reader to the second (alternative) part for the
> details of the event, as if it were an attachment -- but the
> two alternative parts never are displayed together. So, the
> user of any mail client that chooses to display the first part
> is fooled.
>
> To mend the situation,
> - either the first (text/plain) alternative part must be
>   enhanced to contain the same information as the second
>   (text/calendar) one,
> - or the MIME type of the whole message must be altered
>   into "multipart/mixed".
>
> Now, my questions are:
> - Is there a configuration item to achieve one of these
>   goals?
> - If not so, would it be wiser to enhance the text/plain
>   part, or to make the whole message multipart/mixed?
>   Particularly, if I would do the latter, would iCalender-
>   capable clients still work with the text/calendar part?
> - Has anybody mended this issue, already, and is willing
>   to share their solution?

In my opinion, the text/plain part should be enhanced, because  
referring users of non-capable mail clients to the rather technical  
iCalendar attachment is not very user-friendly.
I have chosen the multipart/alternative mime type intentionally, but  
wasn't aware the the plain part was referring to the attachment at  
this point.

Jan.

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