Re: cid:?

On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 15:13 +0000, tony.chamberlain@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> I occasionally get mail from someone with images I can't see.  He
> insists other people can view them.  I just get a big empty box with a
> little red x in the left corner.  When I try to view (via view image),
> it says "firefox does not know how to open this address because the
> protocol cid is not associated with any program).  Doing a view page
> source I see it is
> 
>     cid:000a01c7db83$796af580$0896654c@DDXKT811
> 
> anyone know how to see these?

Messages can embed the images along with the message, or they can
include a URI to get them from the net.  When embedding, such as making
them part of a HTML mail, you have a placeholder in the message like
that, and later on you have the data with an identifier saying that's
that part of the message.

That should work, whatever name is used to identify the parts (other
programs, typically, give the parts understandable names, such as
file.jpeg, but some use strange random filenames).

But it mightn't work if the mail has been malformed in the first place.
e.g. their client gives you parts that are image/jpeg but stupidly
describes them as text/plain.  Or, simply uses "cid" as some sort of
protocol, that only a few clients support, without doing the usual MIME
things with the parts that most mail clients support.

We'd need to see a complete one to know for sure what the problem is.
It's been a long time since I've seen one using that methodology, and I
can't quite remember how they're composed.  I seem to recall that you'd
see them in HTML mail, where instead of doing something like <img
src="http://example.com/pic.jpeg";>, or <img src="pic.jpeg"> and the JPEG
file would be embedded further along as part of the multipart mail,
they'd have a CID thing as the src attribute value, and further down the
message would be the data that's supposed to be used there.

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