multipart/signed RFC 1847 Compliance

[Josh]

I have a question about multipart/signed message handling in Vista's
Windows Mail application pursuant to RFC 1847 section 2.1. When Windows
Mail receives a message in multipart/signed format with just the 2 body
parts specified in the RFC, Windows Mail does not display the body text
in the message and instead puts the entire body into a text file that
appears to be named ATT#####.txt where the #'s are numbers, such as
00013. However, when I alter the message so that inside the
multipart/signed message is multipart/alternative nested MIME
formatting, Windows Mail does correctly display the HTML version of the
message.

I have several questions:

Why does Windows Mail not correctly display the message body when a
standard multipart/signed MIME format is used? (The message is instead
displayed as a .txt attachment with a blank message body.)

Why does it display correctly when another multipart/alternative MIME
body appears beneath the multipart/signed body? (In this case the HTML
alternative message body is displayed as expected.)

Is there any way to get Windows Mail to display the body correctly when
only the multipart/signed MIME formatting is used?

 

[Steve Cochran]

I don't think you can fix it. Its probably a bug. You can try saving the
message and then renaming it to give it a mht file extension and then it
will open in IE. I don't know what the result will be.

steve