![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Learn The Words
May. 19th, 2012 10:16 amFrom: ocado@ocado.com To: (me) Subject: Your receipt for today's Ocado delivery MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_Part_391555_1305389411.1337407149222"
That means “This message contains the same thing several times rendered in different ways”.
------=_Part_391555_1305389411.1337407149222 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi Mr Kettlewell, Your paperless receipt for today's Ocado delivery is attached to this email.
So far so good.
------=_Part_391555_1305389411.1337407149222 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit <html> <body bgcolor="#EFE9E5">
The same thing in HTML. No problem there.
------=_Part_391555_1305389411.1337407149222 Content-Type: application/pdf; name=receipt.pdf Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=receipt.pdf JVBERi0xLjQKJaqrrK0KNCAwIG9iago8PAovUHJvZHVjZXIgKEFwYWNoZSBGT1AgVmVyc2lvbiAw
Something completely different as a PDF. No, that makes no sense whatsoever.
Thunderbird displays the HTML part and offers the PDF as an attachment. That’s probably what they had in mind, but if you try and save the attachment it says it has zero length and gives up. That’s obviously a bug but it is trying to deal with a nonsensical situation.
Apple Mail displays only the PDF.
I don’t think this can have been tested very thoroughly…