970919-3 |
You have received an e-mail message which is unreadable to your e-mail software, and you want to send it to a help desk which can find out what is wong with it. Which MIME structure is suitable for this, and why? |
Possible answer |
The media type message/rfc822 is specially designed for sending whole messages
as body parts of other messages. So a suitable MIME structure might be a message
with two body parts, the first a text asking for help, the second the forwarded unreadable
message as Content-Type: message/rfc822. This might be one of several content parts,
with other parts containing an explanationary text. Some students answered with application/octet-stream, and this would also be possible, but then the receiving mailer would not automatically know that it should try to parse the content as a message. Some students proposed multipart/report, but this format can only be used if the middle content part has a standardised format, and there is no such format in this case. |