[Email-SIG] Generator.HeaderParsedGenerator

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 02:51, Jason R.Mastaler wrote:
> Can the attached patch be considered for inclusion in email?  This
> issue is a former mimelib tracker item, but those trackers are now
> disabled.  I've included the previous commentary leading to the patch
> below.  FWIW, we've been using this in TMDA successfully for months
> now.

So I've been thinking a little bit about this recently.  I'm not sure I
feel comfortable adding this to email 2.x/Python 2.3.  It's definitely a
new feature that is probably not appropriate for a patch release.

But there's a deeper issue which we might want to think about for email
3.0.  Currently we decide how to render a message by its Content-Type
header, but that may not be optimal.  If we had to resort to the
HeaderParser to parse a message, the Content-Type header may lie, or at
least it won't accurately describe the algorithm we should use to
flatten the message.

It doesn't make sense to use some other header, or change the
Content-Type header, so I'm thinking we want individual messages to have
some other say in how they get flattened, either via attribute setting
or method call.  Perhaps messages should have an "effective" content
type which, if present is used instead to determine how to flatten the
message.

I'm just thinking out loud here.

-Barry