From: Chris Hall <christopher.k.hall@...>
Date: 2006-09-30T23:54:38+09:00
Subject: Re: wrong content-type when trying to parse emails with Net::IMAP

ok, maybe i overexplained...

if i look at the RFC822.HEADER, it says

Content-type: Multipart/Mixed; boundary=Message-Boundary-22611

however, BODYSTRUCTURE says otherwise

#<struct Net::IMAP::BodyTypeText media_type="TEXT", subtype="PLAIN",
param={"CHARSET"=>"US-ASCII"}, content_id=nil, description=nil,
encoding="7BIT", size=218060, lines=2959, md5=nil, disposition=nil,
language=nil, extension=nil>

the size and lines correspond to the size of the entire mail.

BODYSTRUCTURE should be Net::IMAP::BodyTypeMultipart

BODY[1] shows:

--Message-Boundary-22611
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-description: blah blah blah

blah blah blah
--Message-Boundary-22611
Content-Type: Application/Octet-stream; name=FOOBAR.ZIP
Content-transfer-encoding: BASE64

...[base64 encoded data]...
--Message-Boundary-22611--

if BODYSTRUCTURE were multipart, the above would have been parsed by
Net::IMAP into the corresponding parts for me to parse, each part
being BodyTypeText and BodyTypeBasic respectively.

now, what i would EXPECT, is that the BODYSTRUCTURE corresponds with
the header and should be multipart/mixed, which would then allow me to
grab the parts described above, but as i have explained this is not
the case.  I deal with other emails that are structured the same way
and the BODYSTRUCTURE does in fact show as multipart/mixed

so the only thing i can surmise from this is that Net::IMAP is not
interpreting the content-type of the mail correctly and defaults to
text/plain us-ascii, as described in the RFC.  now whether it's a
problem internal to Net::IMAP or perhaps the message itself (it was
sent using Pegasus Mail v3.50, a DOS application), i have no way of
knowing, and was looking for insight.

Chris


On 9/29/06, Matt Rose <mattrose@folkwolf.net> wrote:
> On 29-Sep-06, at 4:45 PM, Paul Lutus wrote:
>
> >
> > Sure. In e-mails everything is plain text -- it has to be, in order
> > to be
> > acceptable to the protocol. Therefore the content encoding is set
> > up to
> > consist entirely of ASCII characters. It is up to the receiving
> > software to
> > convert this plain-text form into graphics or whatever the content
> > actually
> > represents.
> >
>
> What paul means is that the Net::IMAP just returns the text, and
> you'll have to parse the MIME attachments from the text that is in
> the body
>
> Just out of curiosity, is there a lib in ruby to do this?
>
> > --
> > Paul Lutus
> > http://www.arachnoid.com
>
> Matt
>
>