HTML mail [was Re: FEL was Re: Hi]

Sun Aug 8 14:30:34 UTC 2010

On Sunday, August 08, 2010 14:49:27 James McKenzie wrote:
> Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> > Here is the message with full headers, as KMail sees it (forgive me for
> > not
> > 
> > trimming anything):
> >  Subject: Hi
> >  From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=C1rp=E1d_Attila_Bakos?= <jaxxco at gmail.com>
> 
> He is using the GMail send agent, probably the Web Mail interface.  It
> creates HTML mail by default.
> 
> >  Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
> >  
> >    boundary="===============1539751590095400808=="
> 
> This is HTML mail.  If it were text, this would be text/plain...

But this is just a declaration. The message doesn't actually contain any html 
code, AFAICS. Things like <head>, <body>, and other tags.

As I understood, html messages are frowned upon because they waste space and 
bandwidth, and because they might contain javascripts and stuff that is 
problematic security-wise. But if the message body just doesn't contain any 
html tags at all, why does a "multipart/mixed" declaration in the header make 
it html?

IOW, shouldn't the mail filter (generic one, I'm not talking specifically about 
g's mail filter) check the actual contents of the message for html stuff, rather 
than just blindly trust the message header?

Best, :-)
Marko