On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 02:36:41PM +0100, Noah Slater wrote: > I guess in some general sense you are correct, but within the > context of a MUA, an attachment has a very specific and well defined > meaning, that is much more narrow than this.
Well, I'm not trying to mislead someone. Where is defined what an attachment is for the context of a MUA, and who made the definition? > An attachment is a message entity that a user is likely to add or > save to and from the file system, as separate to the main message. In Kyles example, that would be saving the html attachment to view it in a web browser. The user might do that himself, the MUA might do it automatically. If you use a MUA that cannot display text/plain, you might save the text/plain to display it ... And who is to decide how likely a particular user is to save a particular attachment, for the purpose of the MUA counting the attachments? The MUA would have a hard time to figure that out. > A good litmus test, although by no means perfect, would be if the > entity has an explicit file name. In the example that Kyle gave, > there are clearly no attachments, and I would not want to use a MUA > that listed any. To me, it has clearly three attachments. It doesn't matter if a user is likely to save an attachment or not. BTW, what's a "message entity"? Attachments are not "message entities" if you look at RFC822.
