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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.

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