Comment 5 for bug 881411

This message came up Content-Type "multipart/related", whereas it should have come with "multipart/alternative". The overall structure is

|- multipart/related
   |- multipart/alternative
       |- text/plain
       |- text/html
   |- image/png
   |- image/png

whereas the correct structure would have been:

|- multipart/altenative
   |- text/plain
   |- multipart/related
       |- text/html
       |- image/png
       |- image/png

Assuming that you are using emacs-w3m to decode html, VM would pass the multipart/related content to emacs-w3m, which handles the images fine. However, since the message came with a multipart/alternative as the starting component of multipart/related, emacs-w3m gets only the text/html part and not the images.

I notice that an old RFC, 1872, asked for this kind of special treatment of multipart/alternative. See section 3.2. However, this has been removed in the standard (RFC 2387). That doesn't stop some software makers from continuing the practice, I suppose.

I will think about how best to work around the problem.