Attachments not being included in forwarded mail

[William Unruh]

Suddenly attachments are not being included in forwarded mail for my
wife in alpine (alpine-2.11-5.mga7). I cannot see what there could be in
.pinerc to differentiate her system from mine ( I also use the same
alpine, and there seems little difference in .pinerc) When I forward a
mail the attachments of the mail I am forwarding are automatically
included, but when she runs pine, they are not. What is misconfigured in
her system?

[Eduardo Chappa]

One way this could happen is if there are two parts to the message, for
example a text/plain part and a text/html part, under a
multipart/alternative. In a case like this forwarding the message does not
forward both "attachments", only one of them is forwarded. The same would
be true if the text/html attachment has more attachments itself
(sometimes pictures).

One way to accomplish forwarding attachments, would be to press "A" to go
to the alternative part and forward the alternative part with its
attachments.

I hope this helps.

--
Eduardo
https://tinyurl.com/yc377wlh (web)
http://repo.or.cz/alpine.git (Git)

[William Unruh]

On 2020-07-08, Eduardo Chappa <cha...@washington.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Jul 2020, William Unruh wrote:
>
>> Suddenly attachments are not being included in forwarded mail for my
>> wife in alpine (alpine-2.11-5.mga7). I cannot see what there could be in
>> .pinerc to differentiate her system from mine ( I also use the same
>> alpine, and there seems little difference in .pinerc) When I forward a
>> mail the attachments of the mail I am forwarding are automatically
>> included, but when she runs pine, they are not. What is misconfigured in
>> her system?
>
> One way this could happen is if there are two parts to the message, for
> example a text/plain part and a text/html part, under a
> multipart/alternative. In a case like this forwarding the message does not
> forward both "attachments", only one of them is forwarded. The same would
> be true if the text/html attachment has more attachments itself
> (sometimes pictures).

Perhaps this is what is happening.
Here is the attachment display

Parts/Attachments:
1 Shown ~24 lines Text
2.1 OK ~44 lines Text
2.2 OK 94 KB Image
2.3 OK 85 KB Image
2.4 OK 91 KB Image
2.5 OK 82 KB Image
2.6 OK 92 KB Image
2.7 OK 89 KB Image
2.8 OK 100 KB Image

So the attachments do seem to be subattachments of the html version of
the message.

>
> One way to accomplish forwarding attachments, would be to press "A" to go
> to the alternative part and forward the alternative part with its
> attachments.

This does not seem to work. It does switch to 2.1 being shown, but if I
do F to forward it, I still do not get the images included in the
forwarded message.
I tried to click on the "Include Attachments in Reply" preference, but
that seems to have done nothing.
I also just enabled the "Forward messages as attachments" which does
appear to forward the attachments, but now everything is pushed down one
layer of attachments. But it still does not answer why on my pine,
attachments were included in a forward, and in hers they were not. Both
did not have the "Forward Messages as attachements" checked. Both did
not have "Include Attachments in Reply" but mine included attachments (
in the same level as originally-- Ie, 2.1 did not become 2.1.1) and hers
did not.

[Eduardo Chappa]

On Wed, 8 Jul 2020, William Unruh wrote:

> Perhaps this is what is happening.
> Here is the attachment display
>
> Parts/Attachments:
> 1 Shown ~24 lines Text
> 2.1 OK ~44 lines Text
> 2.2 OK 94 KB Image

> [...]

>
> So the attachments do seem to be subattachments of the html version of
> the message.

That is the point. I see a multipart/alternative message there. The first
part is text, the second part contains several parts, by itself, and while
you call those parts attachments, they are not for purposes of what you
want to do.

Let me explain the difference. In order to understand this better think of
normal mail, the one you have to put a stamp on to send it. The message
you got is equivalent to receiving a two page letter. The first part is a
single page with just text, the second page is the same message, but with
pictures in that page.

What you would like to do is to forward the second page with all those
pictures, not the first page that does not have any. What you would like
is to add more text to the already written message, so what you would like
to do is to forward the second page of the letter, not the first, or you
would like to forward the firs page but cut the pictures from the second
page. Alpine does neither.

The reason why you cannot forward the second page of the letter and add
text to it is because the second part is written in HTML, and Alpine does
not edit nor produce HTML. Those images that are part of that message are
actually referenced in the HTML part, and so when the message is produced
their names are not filenames, but are referenced in different ways
(called Content-ID) and this is an "internal" (to that part or page of the
letter) link. In other words, when you forward the message, it will lose
its structure (the position of the pictures in the second page will be
lost, for example).

Similarly, cutting the pictures from the second part and adding them as
attachments to the first part, will make all those images not be
references correctly in the message. They are only needed for the second
page, not the first. This is happening to you because you use a text-only
email program that does not know how to deal with the second part. I would
suggest that to forward those messages that you use a different email
program that was designed to do that.

Had the pictures come as real attachments, that is, not printed in the
second page, but as actual pictures, in different pages, then Alpine could
forward the attachments, because in that case the attachments would be
such, but in they case you are showing me they are not. Does this make
sense?