Testing Multipart Messages?

Mr E

Hi folks,

Can anyone recommend a way of testing multipart messages? I can't find a setting in outlook to receive text-only emails (if its there, its well hidden!).

Any suggestions?

- Dave.

Zaltais

I'm guessing you're testing multipart emails with text/html and text/plain content in them? If so and it's a POP3 email address - I use www.mail2web.com - it let's you switch between the TEXT and HTML versions.

In outlook if you right click on the message (not the preview window) and click 'Options' - there's a box there that says 'Internet Headers' - You'll see the content types in there (but not the contents unfortunately!). So you should keep your eye out for four things:

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
This is a multi-part message in MIME format...
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"

Yours may not exactly match this but the three content type headers are the main ones to look out for.


You can get outlook to only view the text part of a multipart, but it's a registry hack - so it's a right pain in the arse.


Alternatively I've a perl script here that'll just dump the contents of an email out as plain text with full headers etc. PM me if you want to send me a couple of test emails.

Cheers,

Zaltais

Mr E

Thanks Zaltais. I'll try mail2web later.

I found a nice way of doing it here using an Echo mailer. You send a multipart message to this address and it will return the entire email back to you with both parts visible (text and HTML - note that it doesn't render the HTML). Very handy...

- Dave.