HTML mail (was: PHP contact manager)

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 09:29:55AM -0400, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On Sep 27, 2005, at 08:50, Ben Scott wrote:
> 
> >But it was mangling your
> >messages, making already cryptic output almost unreadable.
> 
> Ben, you need a MUA that can handle multi-part MIME messages.  Set it 
> to show you the text/plain alternative.

No. The problem is that Greg's client was sending text/plain -- but
still munging it. The content in the URL that Ben linked to *was* the
text/plain part of the message: the IPs were still being munged by
whatever client was sending the content.

Given plain text inputs, mail clients should not munge the text/plain
content to be more like HTML. Greg's mailer was doing that. 

It looks like that email came from Gmail - I'm kind of surprised they
would do something like that, which makes me wonder if it's something
elsewhere that's causing the problem. Since Greg mentioned highlighting
content in pink and green, it would seem possible to me that the content
was actually input as HTML in some way, which might explain the
text/plain content. The rich text editor saw an IP address, turned it
into a link, and the conversion to text/plain converted that link to a
"text followed by link in brackets".

However, I can assure you that it is not Ben's MUA that is causing the
problem in this situation, nor is mailman doing the wrong thing.
Whatever editor was being used was affecting the text/plain content as
if it was coming from HTML.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt