On Mon, 2004-11-01 at 08:59, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> Total messages 6262
> Message Content Types
>
> 7375 text/plain
Craig Thomas wrote:
> Please forgive me if this has been asked and answered before, but these
> numbers confuse me. How can there be more mime types than messages?
> attachments? what am I missing.
It's to do with the way the list software works, and, I suspect, how the
counting software works.
In particular, it is trivial to get list software to add a standard
signature to a plain text e-mail. However, it is distinctly less than
trivial to add a standard list signature to signed e-mails, and to mixed
HTML/plain text e-mails, or e-mails with attachments.
You should understand that with these e-mails (sent using the MIME,
Multipart Internet Mail Extensions, IIRC RFC 2045 and following), each
part of the mail has its own content-type: the plain text version, the
HTML version, any signed e-mails where the signature uses MIME to hold
the signature, and the attachment. I suspect the counting script counts
all these content types.
What the list software seems to do, when the e-mail is any more
complicated than plain text, is to put the existing e-mail into a MIME
multipart/mixed structure, and append a text/plain signature. In those
cases, you'll get one text/plain for the main e-mail, and one for the
signature.
It seems to work.
James.
--
E-mail address: james | Space Opera: General term for a subgenre of adventure
@westexe.demon.co.uk | SF in which the men are heroic, the women beautiful,
| the monsters monstrous, and the spaceships make
| whooshing sounds in hard vacuum. -- Eric Raymond
