Re: Need test data

From: David Kilzer <ddkilzer_at_madison.dseg.ti.com_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 14:55:26 -0500
Message-Id: <199805111955.OAA12215_at_wildcat.dseg.ti.com>

Kent Landfield <kent_at_landfield.com> writes:

>This is a request for messages that we can use to test the new version
>of hypermail. I am looking to put together a set of data that tests the
>MIME and general hypermail header parsing. I have a few messages here
>but I'd like to have examples of other messages that may have caused you
>trouble in the past or have some complicate MIME examples that we need
>to support. If you send a message and you would like me to "cleanse"
>the headers (names/IP changed to protect the innocent) just let me know
>and I will.
>
>You can either bounce (remail) the messages to hypermail-data_at_landfield.com
>or put them up for ftp/http and tell me where to grab them from. Thanks.

I don't have any examples off-hand, but here are a couple "gothcas" that the MIME coders may want to be aware of.

1. Some mail software attaches a "file" with message attributes. I would consider these MIME attachments as "garbage" and not bother saving them into a file. Two mail clients that I know of that do this are:

       BeyondMail
         Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="ATTRIBS.BND"
       MS Exchange (Outlook???)
         Content-Type: application/ms-tnef; name="WINMAIL.DAT"
         Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-tnef; name="WINMAIL.DAT"

  2. Mail clients that send TWO copies of the same message...one as
     text/plain and one as text/html.  If you trust the HTML encoding,
     this can be a Good Thing as most of your work is done for you.  If
     not, discard the HTML and process the text.  The only two I know of
     off-hand are:

       Netscape Mail
       CyberDog (a Mac OS web/mail client that used OpenDoc technology)

     The tricky part is knowing when this feature has been activated or
     deactived for a given message.

  3. And finally, if you're going to use the attachment's real filename,
     note that some attachments may not have filenames, so make sure to
     have a backup naming scheme just in case.

I've created patches to Hypermail in the past (I believe they were passed on to Kent through the former maintainer, Kevin), but haven't had a chance to look at the latest release. I will most likely be reworking the HTML archives at work in the next couple of months and hope to take a look at Hypermail again at that time.

For now, I'll continue to lurk on hypermail-digest. :^)

Dave Received on Mon 11 May 1998 10:18:49 PM GMT