Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Raymond Scholz]

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Hello!

A few days ago, somebody reported in a German newsgroup that he
couldn't automatically display a mail with a correctly declared
Content-Type: text/html. I told him that I've never had any problems
with this. Well, I now ran into the same problem. 

I got two HTML mails (no multipart, SPAM of course). The first
displays fine, the second doesn't and appears as HTML source. Looking
at the MIME headers, I can't figure what causes this behaviour. 

When saving the HTML content in an extra file, W3 mode displays both
mails as expected.

Here is the second (incorrectley displayed) mail:


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From: wampun@necs.postmaster.co.uk
To: @informatik.uni-bremen.de@vhost2.systemv.com
Subject: Earn 100K Plus a year! -aixnyg
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 23:58:23 -0500
Message-ID: <vlmmixw.wjsmwc@jvxrjgu.jarh66@nexxmail.com>

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I did not include the mail which is rendered correctly because it's
rather big.

I put them here:

http://rscholz.dusnet.de/spam_ok.mail
http://rscholz.dusnet.de/spam_not_ok.mail

Cheers,
  Ray
-- 
Raymond Scholz -*- rscholz@tzi.de -*- http://www.tzi.de/~rscholz/
FB 3 Informatik, Universität Bremen -*- PGP key available via WWW

Re: Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Raymond Scholz <rscholz@tzi.de> writes:
> I got two HTML mails (no multipart, SPAM of course). The first
> displays fine, the second doesn't and appears as HTML source. Looking
> at the MIME headers, I can't figure what causes this behaviour. 

The problem with the message you forwarded is that it contains no
MIME-Version header in the first place.  Gnus correctly declines to
display as MIME a message which does not claim to be MIME in the first
place.

"Content-Type: text/html" is necessary but not sufficient.
"MIME-Version: 1.0" is also needed.

> Subject: Earn 100K Plus a year! -aixnyg
> Reply-To: datsmyne008@yahoo.com
> From: wampun@necs.postmaster.co.uk
> Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 23:58:23 -0500
> X-Gnus-Mail-Source: file:/var/spool/mail/rscholz
> Message-Id: <vlmmixw.wjsmwc@jvxrjgu.jarh66@nexxmail.com>
> To: @informatik.uni-bremen.de@vhost2.systemv.com
> Content-Type: text/html;
> 	charset="iso-8859-1"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
> X-UIDL: ca629e293b81b3df6b0f77400e797bb9
> Lines: 73
> Xref: mde1.home mail.spam:16
> X-Gnus-Article-Number: 16   Tue Jan 18 14:53:58 2000

As it happens, Netscrape's mail interface is deranged enough that it
will intuit MIMEness in the face of Content-Type alone.  But this is
true derangement, and jwz even admitted as much a couple years ago
when discussing such matters in news.software.readers.

Re: Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Kai Großjohann]

The `bad' mail is missing a Mime-Version header.
kai
-- 
A large number of young women don't trust men with beards.  (BFBS Radio)

Re: Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Kai" == Kai Großjohann <Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE> writes:

    Kai> The `bad' mail is missing a Mime-Version header.

It shows up OK here...

Which is quite remarkable considering most HTML code I have seen
lately isn't parsed correctly by w3.

-- 
Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au>

Re: Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Alan Shutko]

Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au> writes:

> Which is quite remarkable considering most HTML code I have seen
> lately isn't parsed correctly by w3.

Is most of it MS Word output?  I haven't tried upgrading (a really old
W3 here, as things go) and that's the only thing I have problems with.

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
The Joy of Sax: Jazz music in the Late 20th Century.

Re: Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Alan" == Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> writes:

    Alan> Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au> writes:
    >> Which is quite remarkable considering most HTML code I have
    >> seen lately isn't parsed correctly by w3.

    Alan> Is most of it MS Word output?  I haven't tried upgrading (a
    Alan> really old W3 here, as things go) and that's the only thing
    Alan> I have problems with.

I am not sure. I don't normally check. It just get white writing on a
white background. At one stage, I thought this was because of my
monochrome monitor, but the same thing happens with color, too.

Actually, I suspect a lot of my problems might be because I run xemacs
from text mode a lot of the time. I think using X-Windows removes a
number of problems. I am sure I have had problems with the X version
in the past, but can't reproduce any right now ;-).

Sometime I might try and investigate the possibility of using lynx for
text mode sessions instead.
-- 
Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au>

Re: Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Michael Welsh Duggan]

Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au> writes:

> >>>>> "Alan" == Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> writes:
> 
>     Alan> Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au> writes:
>     >> Which is quite remarkable considering most HTML code I have
>     >> seen lately isn't parsed correctly by w3.
> 
>     Alan> Is most of it MS Word output?  I haven't tried upgrading (a
>     Alan> really old W3 here, as things go) and that's the only thing
>     Alan> I have problems with.
> 
> I am not sure. I don't normally check. It just get white writing on a
> white background. At one stage, I thought this was because of my
> monochrome monitor, but the same thing happens with color, too.

I used to get the same problem.  The following setting is advised:
(setq w3-user-colors-take-precedence t)

-- 
Michael Duggan
(md5i@cs.cmu.edu)

Re: Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Welsh Duggan <md5i@cs.cmu.edu> writes:

    Michael> I used to get the same problem.  The following setting is
    Michael> advised: (setq w3-user-colors-take-precedence t)

Thanks for this tip. Will try it later.

-- 
Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au>

Re: Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Jim Davidson]

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Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au> writes:

> >>>>> "Kai" == Kai Großjohann <Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE> writes:
> 
>     Kai> The `bad' mail is missing a Mime-Version header.
> 
> It shows up OK here...
> 
> Which is quite remarkable considering most HTML code I have seen
> lately isn't parsed correctly by w3.
> 
> -- 
> Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au>

I've found W3 to be fairly good, given the obvious limitations of Emacs.  It's
a little slow, so I use Netscape for large messages, but it's otherwise OK.

-- 
Jim Davidson
jdavidso @ csi.com

Re: Displaying mails with Content-Type: text/html

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Davidson <jdavidso@nospam.com> writes:

    Jim> Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au> writes:
    >> >>>>> "Kai" == Kai Großjohann
    >> <Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE> writes:
    >> 
    Kai> The `bad' mail is missing a Mime-Version header.
    >> It shows up OK here...
    >> 
    >> Which is quite remarkable considering most HTML code I have
    >> seen lately isn't parsed correctly by w3.
    >> 
    >> -- Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au>

    Jim> I've found W3 to be fairly good, given the obvious
    Jim> limitations of Emacs.  It's a little slow, so I use Netscape
    Jim> for large messages, but it's otherwise OK.

I often get errors, for instance, when trying to view
http://bugs.debian.org/:

Signaling: (wrong-type-argument char-or-string-p 35486)
  w3-parse-buffer(#<buffer " *URL-2*">)
  w3-prepare-buffer()
  w3-pass-to-viewer()
  w3-sentinel(#<buffer " *URL-2*">)
  w3-fetch("http://www.debian.org/Bugs/")
  url-maybe-relative("http://www.debian.org/Bugs/")
  url-parse-mime-headers(nil t)
  url-retrieve-internally("http://bugs.debian.org/" nil)
  url-retrieve("http://bugs.debian.org/")
  #<compiled-function (from "w3.elc") (&optional url target) "...(604)" [w3-setup-done w3-do-setup boundp w3-working-buffer url-working-buffer command-line-args-left string-match url-nonrelative-link url "" error "No document specified!" "^www:[^/].*" file-name-directory url-current-object 5 4 nil string-to-char ?\  1 target w3-base-target intern w3-target-window-distances window-distance other-window (_blank external) w3-fetch-other-frame _top delete-other-windows message "target %S not found." ?\# w3-relative-link current-prefix-arg w3-dump-to-disk w3-download-url url-view-url t url-buffer-visiting buf lastbuf x url-request-method "GET" "get" w3-reuse-buffers (no never reload) (yes reuse always) ...] 6 ("/usr/lib/xemacs-20.4/lisp/w3/w3.elc" . 7030) (list (w3-read-url-with-default))>("http://bugs.debian.org/")
  call-interactively(w3-fetch)

Then again perhaps that is because I am using the w3 that comes with
w3? I think this version was old.

I will try the newest version later.
-- 
Brian May <bmay@csse.monash.edu.au>