![[lang]](/images/eye.png)
Evolution mailing iPhone |
2011-01-26
|
I must be missing something blindingly obvious. I'm sure at least one of the Evolution hackers has an iPhone. But as far as I can tell, Evolution cannot send mails with attachments to iPhones such that the iPhone can show the attachment.
It looks like Evolution can only send multipart/mixed, and Mail.app on iPhone only understands multipart/alternative.
Now, far be it from me to be surprised at Apple not understanding established standards. But really - am I the only one having this problem ?
I did this just 3 hours ago and it worked. Latest iOS 4.2, latest Evolution on Fedora.
(As you can see from my first comment, I typed this on an iDevice…)
Comment by Leon — 2011-01-26 @ 23:50
I’ve encountered this problem as well. I was planning on opening up a bug report at Apple about it but haven’t had the initiative to. Thank goodness for webmail. Perhaps I’ll do that later. Hopefully Apple fixes things.
Comment by Dexter Ang — 2011-01-27 @ 00:00
I’m pretty sure apple mail does support multipart/mixed, cause I think it used to send it by default.
But anyways, it’s not that multipart/alternative is the alternative to multipart/mixed, but rather HTML in a multipart/related container.
It does wrap a multipart/alternative around it, though, to add the plaintext alternative. So the final structure is:
– multipart/alternative
– text/plain
– multipart/related
– text/html (with inline links to…)
– image/jpeg (or whatever)
The HTML uses urls like “cid:$LONG_UUID” which match up with the Content-Id: header in the image/jpeg section, as defined by rfc2387. I think that’s the way the rest of the world (aka MS exchange) also formats emails.
Comment by James Knight — 2011-01-27 @ 00:37
multipart/alternative is for different variations of the same content, most commonly used for having a plaintext fallback in HTML mail. The MIME parts are arranged in increasing order of desireability and a mail client is supposed to pick the last part that it knows how to display and disregard the other parts. So multipart/alternative is not suitable for attachments.
Evolution sends multipart/alternative when sending HTML mail, and if there’s also attachments then it bundles the multipart/alternative inside a multipart/mixed alongside the attachment parts.
I don’t have an iPhone but my wife does (an older 3G model), and she was able to read a quick test mail with attachments.
Comment by Matthew Barnes — 2011-01-27 @ 03:25