Discussion:
Warning re. obscure reformat fwd mail with attachment
David Morris
2008-12-09 21:45:29 UTC
Permalink
I recognize that pine isn't going to be fixed, and I'd go so far as to
suggest my older version of pine may have been fixed.

But this issue has certainly made me look quite unprofessional.

The result, which I found in the sent-mail folder record, was that the
forwarded mail and my cover note were all flowed together into a single
paragraph.

I'm using Dice to look for a new project or job. When I find a posting of
interest, I use the Dice 'Apply' function to send my resume and a cover
note and also send a copy to myself. In some cases, I then forward a copy
of the mail sent by Dice to another email address.

When in the pine composer, the forwarded cover note and my added comment
all appear as they always do when I forward using pine. Reasonably neat,
individual paragraphs, etc. The resume attachment is preserved.

Today looking in the sent mail log folder, I discovered the problem noted
above. I've conducted a number of experiments to confirm that forwarding
the Dice apply confirmation, with or without adding a comment and also
removing the attachment always results in the whole email flowed into a
single paragraph during send and save to the mail folder.

It looks like what happened is that Dice sent the original email as
text/html with appropriate <br> tags to force new lines. When pine
forwarded the mail, it retained the text/html content type, but
didn't include <br> tags. So the receiving rendering engine says
to show the whole thing as a single paragraph. When I look in the
physical sent mail folder, I find text/html as the content type but
only \n between lines.

Any way I can't currently use alpine, but I wanted to warn any residual
pine users that some of their mail may not be received the way it was
sent.

Dave Morris
Eduardo Chappa
2008-12-10 02:13:56 UTC
Permalink
On Tue, 9 Dec 2008, David Morris wrote:

:) It looks like what happened is that Dice sent the original email as
:) text/html with appropriate <br> tags to force new lines. When pine
:) forwarded the mail, it retained the text/html content type, but
:) didn't include <br> tags.

This seems like a bug in Pine. The problem seems to be that Pine is
not changing the content-type to text/plain. I suspect that when you
forward the message you do not see the <html> tags, but plain text. If
that is the case, then the problem is the content type of the message.

In this case, what you need to do is to convince Pine that it needs to tag
your messag as text/plain and not as text/html. There is a trick to send
the content-type of a message when sending the mail, and you can use it to
change the content-type to text/plain. An explanation of how to do this
can be found in the following post in comp.mail.pine

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.pine/browse_thread/thread/7c187285b7d02441/

Hopefully you can use that trick to change the content-type to text/plain,
rather than (as explained in the post) to text/html.
--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/
David Morris
2008-12-10 03:17:14 UTC
Permalink
Post by Eduardo Chappa
:) It looks like what happened is that Dice sent the original email as
:) text/html with appropriate <br> tags to force new lines. When pine
:) forwarded the mail, it retained the text/html content type, but
:) didn't include <br> tags.
...
Post by Eduardo Chappa
In this case, what you need to do is to convince Pine that it needs to tag
your messag as text/plain and not as text/html. There is a trick to send
the content-type of a message when sending the mail, and you can use it to
change the content-type to text/plain. An explanation of how to do this
can be found in the following post in comp.mail.pine
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.pine/browse_thread/thread/7c187285b7d02441/
Hopefully you can use that trick to change the content-type to text/plain,
rather than (as explained in the post) to text/html.
Awesome ... I had to use:
echo "Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII" > $2
without charset, pine added it, but inserted a new line without
leading whitespace. That broke header parsing at yahoo where I was
testing.

With "compose-send-offers-first-filter" set prompting for filter usage was
bypassed. It just ran, which is fine with me. I NEVER want a different
value.

Thanks,
Dave Morris

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