[LON-CAPA-dev] multipart messages

Martin Siegert lon-capa-dev@mail.lon-capa.org
Tue, 23 Nov 2004 10:59:57 -0800


Hi,

every LON-CAPA server sends email everyday to sysadmins informing of
the status of the machine. Starting with about version 1.2 the format
of these emails seems to have changed. My inbox shows them in the
following way:

  35   T Nov 23 WWW Administrat ( 87K) L (part 2 of 2)
  36   T Nov 23 WWW Administrat ( 96K) L (part 1 of 2)
  37   T Nov 23 WWW Administrat ( 17K) L (part 2 of 2)
  38   T Nov 23 WWW Administrat ( 96K) L (part 1 of 2)
  39   T Nov 23 WWW Administrat (9.0K) L (part 2 of 2)
  40   T Nov 23 WWW Administrat ( 96K) L (part 1 of 2)
  41   T Nov 23 www             ( 94K) LON: sfua3 E:0 W:596 N:11

The first six come from sful1, sfua1, sfua2. Thus, each of these three
servers seem to split the email into two parts and the subject line
contains no valuable information anymore (in contrast to the message
41 above). Furthermore, my email reader (mutt) does not support multipart
messages, thus the only thing I can do with these is to delete them.
The last of these messages comes from sfua3 - this is an access server
that is running SuSE-9.1. While this is better, there is a problem
as well: the mime header of that email is set to "text/plain", which
is incorrect - it ought to be "text/html". Thus, the message does
not trigger the html reader and is displayed as plain text. Thus,
the only reasonable thing to do is to hit the "d" key as well.

The question is what decides whether these emails are sent out as
multipart messages (mime type "message/partial") or as a single
message? And where can I change the mime type from "text/plain"
to "text/html" on the SuSE box?

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
Martin Siegert
Head, HPC@SFU
WestGrid Site Manager
Academic Computing Services                        phone: (604) 291-4691
Simon Fraser University                            fax:   (604) 291-4242
Burnaby, British Columbia                          email: siegert@sfu.ca
Canada  V5A 1S6