[Gllug] Personal Email sigs

[Tethys]

Nix writes:

>On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, Tethys stipulated:
>> As someone else mentioned, you wouldn't want to do this on the server.
>> Just configure your email client to do it instead. In fact, it's provably
>> impossible to do it correctly on the server, although you can take a stab
>> at it that will get it right for most common cases.
>
>Impossible? I know it would be woefully unconfigurable done there, but
>*impossible*? Appending text to the mail body is an RFC violation and
>nasty but I can't see why it's impossible.

I said it was impossible to do *correctly*, not that it was impossible
to do at all. Indeed it is impossible[1] in the general case, because
you don't know where you're supposed to be attaching the extra text.
Consider the following two cases, both multipart/mixed messages:

Message 1:
- text/plain body containing instructions on how to put the web page live
- text/html web page that I'm sending to a client to fix their web site

Message 2:
- text/plain config file that I'm sending to a client to fix their server
- text/html body containing instructions on how to deploy the attached config

For message 1, the server would need to add the extra text to the
text/plain part. For message 2, it would need to add it to the
text/html part. How is it to know which is which?

Like I said, it'll work in the general case, but there will always be
cases where it will corrupt mail.

In theory, you can merely add another text/plain part, containing the
text you wish to add. In reality, this fails because of the number
of broken MUAs that don't honour RFC1806, and do the wrong thing with
Content-Disposition: inline.

Tet

[1] Well, until someone writes a foolproof natural language parser, at least.
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