[p2pu-dev] Strange email attachment

[Laurian Gridinoc]

On 28 Jan 2011, at 21:07, Gabriel Totoliciu wrote:

> I noticed that many emails that come from the new dev mailing list (p2pu-dev at lists.p2pu.org) have some strange attachments (see attached picture).
>  
> The file contains this:
> “_______________________________________________
> p2pu-dev mailing list
> p2pu-dev at lists.p2pu.org
> http://lists.p2pu.org/mailman/listinfo/p2pu-dev”
>  
> All of them contain a file named something like this “Untitled attachment 00892.txt”. Is my email client acting weird or everyone else gets the same attachment?
> Am I doing something wrong and not noticing it / Is there something I should know?

Your Microsoft Outlook 14.0 (as per your email headers) is not handling properly multipart messages, if a mail send to the list is not just plain text (most clients send HTML mail), the mailing list manager will add that signature like this:

--===============5856919447865107581==
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

_______________________________________________
p2pu-dev mailing list
p2pu-dev at lists.p2pu.org
http://lists.p2pu.org/mailman/listinfo/p2pu-dev

--===============5856919447865107581==--

Usually an HTML message is set with the header
Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============5856919447865107581==" 
which means that it is split in parts by that boundary, usually  you have the first part being a multipart/alternative, containing the text then HTML version of the mail, such that each client will choose to display what it does best (nowadays HTML), the other displayable parts should be displayed unless they are attachments.

Apparently Outlook cannot handle plain text bits after HTML and it handles them as attachments instead of rendering them.
The filename you see (00892.txt) is just another artefact of Outlook file storage for attachments.

Cheers,

Laurian Gridinoc
http://purl.org/net/laur
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