Re: Counfounding MIME

[David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

At Wed, 27 Oct 2010 08:52:52 -0700,
Erik Hetzner wrote:
> 
> At Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:28:40 -0400,
> David Abrahams wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I'm hoping someone can explain to me how to get MIME working more
> > smoothly in WL.  It almost never seems to do what I want, and I don't
> > know how to get back to the state where it does.  For example, right
> > now I'm looking at this:
> >
> > […]
> >
> > I know I was seeing inline images in messages a few days ago; now I
> > can't get these to display.  When I try to "view" them (`v'), it just
> > asks me if I want to save them to a file.  My .mailcap contains:
> > 
> >   */*; /usr/bin/open %s
> >   text/html; sh -c "mv %s %s.html && /usr/bin/open %s.html"
> > 
> > which theoretically should cause them to be opened with the default
> > program for their file type on my Mac (right?), but that isn't having
> > any effect.
> 
> The messages might have Content-Disposition: attachment, in which case
> I think that WL is doing the right thing by not displaying them. You
> might try C-c C-v C-c on the mime “button”, which toggles visibility.
> 
> A few other comments: image/jpg is wrong; the mimetype is
> image/jpeg. Adding an image/jpg mimetype to mailcap might help, if
> there is not one.

Heh, naturally `C-c C-t C-c' just shows a bunch of garbled text,
probably because as you say, the mime type is wrong.  Now, the problem
is that that mime type was inserted by Apple Mail (2.1081), so if it's
wrong, it's a very common wrongness that WL should work around.

> Maybe I am missing something, but I think that the lines in mailcap
> that matter are the image/jpg lines.

Sure... WL doesn't do wildcard matches in the mailcap?  If it did, */*
should work.

> Finally, sometimes C-u v helps; it ignores
> mime-acting-situation-example-list.

Not in this case; it just says "No method are specified for nil" and
asks if I want to save to disk.

> > Another problem is that WL is constantly asking me what encoding I
> > want to use for attachments that I'm sending, and I don't know what
> > the best answers are.  Gnus never used to bother me with questions
> > about encoding.  
> > 
> > In all, I'm left with the impression that WL supplies lots of powerful
> > low-level tools for handling MIME, but doesn't assemble them, by
> > default, into a reasonably-usable whole.  I would be happy to propose
> > some default configuration if I knew how to make any of this stuff
> > work more intuitively, but I don't.
> 
> WL does come with good tools to guess a file’s mime type, encoding,
> etc. but it does prompt when used interactively. I like this myself,
> but it seems it could be a config parameter. Try the following:

Thanks; I'll check that out!


-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com