[Mimedefang] Problems with append_text_boilerplate

Damrose, Mark mdamrose at elgin.edu
Thu Jun 3 13:41:53 EDT 2004


-----Original Message-----
From: David F. Skoll [mailto:dfs at roaringpenguin.com]
> On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Damrose, Mark wrote:
> 
> > Shouldn't this part have a "Content-Type: text/plain" header?
> 
> Surprisingly, it's not required.  According to RFC 2045:
> 
> 5.2.  Content-Type Defaults
> 
>    Default RFC 822 messages without a MIME Content-Type 
> header are taken
>    by this protocol to be plain text in the US-ASCII character set,
>    which can be explicitly specified as:

That section is referring to the headers of a non-MIME message - for 
backward compatability.

We're discussing an entity of a multipart/mixed MIME message.  

However...  doing a bit of looking around, I don't see any explicit
way to deal with headers of an entity, but

Appendix A of RFC 2049 has an example of a text entity with no headers
at all, so I have to agree with your conclusion.

I still think I'd recommend a content-type header under the "be 
conservative in what you send" principle.



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