TECH: MIME Digests

I've now set myself to receive MIME Digests, and can confirm that what the
LISTSERV sends conforms perfectly to the RFCs.

However, GMail doesn't understand them correctly, so I see all the messages
run together (bug 1) with no sender or subject headers (bug 2) -- but the
combined effect of the two bugs means that it actually displays all text in
the correct character set!

(Technically, each MIME part of a multipart message starts with a set of
headers followed by a blank line, but in the digest case the set of headers
is empty, with the content-type defaulting to message/rfc822 -- and then the
included messages has its own set of _message_ headers which may include
content-type and charset. Experiments show that GMail ignores the first
blank line (bug 2) and interprets the message headers as MIME part headers,
not displaying them but applying the content-xxx headers. It also fails to
apply the content-type default (bug 1) which would otherwise have put a
'forwarded message' divider and header field block at the start of each
message).

Since Google seems to be impervious to bug reports, this could be half fixed
by having LISTSERV include a (formally useless but also harmless)
'Content-Type: message/rfc822' header in each MIME part header block. Since
I have conlang mail passing through procmail at one point, I just hacked in
a Perl oneliner to do just that, but I still won't be seeing individual
messages that can be replied to. Perhaps it's time to go back to mutt.

--
Lars