MIME displaying errors

[Uday Reddy]

Posted on vm.info (2011-03-31)

If an error is encountered while displaying a MIME attachment, e.g., file not found, error in an external viewer., VM has been designed to write that error message into an internal field and continue silently. We might call this "aggressive error recovery".

To test this behavior, you might for instance save an attachment into a file, then rename the file to something else. Now, if you click on the attachment, you would expect to get a "file not found" error. Instead, VM fires up the external viewer as if everything is normal and passes it some dummy text. What the external viewer might do in response is anybody's guess.