[Alpine-info] Forwarded mail partially invisible in Outlook

[Olaf Skibbe]

Hi all,

I came across a strange issue which is most likely related to outlook. 
But since alpine is involved, I want to make sure that the problem is 
not caused by alpine.

Using alpine, I forwarded mails containing several parts. I wrote some 
text in the mail as well.

The recipients using outlook then do not see my text, but solely the 
forwarded mail as if it would have been send to them directly.

The problem occurs only when for some reason the text of the forwarded 
mail is attached instead of being cited. The mails that showed this 
problem, all consisted of several parts including attachments (e.g. 
PDFs). I used such a mail as a template to create a minimal example (by 
editing the raw mail text) and then sent it to myself. In alpine, this 
example mail looks as follows:

===Start=================================
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2024 17:38:34 +0100 (CET)
From: Olaf Skibbe <olaf at kravcenko.com>
To: Olaf Skibbe <olaf at kravcenko.com>
Subject: Mail parts invisible in Outlook
Parts/Attachments:
    1     Shown    1 lines  Text
    2.1.1 Shown   ~3 lines  Text (charset: ISO-8859-1)
    2.1.2   OK    ~7 lines  Text (charset: ISO-8859-1)
----------------------------------------

New added text in forwarded mail.

     [ Part 2.1.1: "Attached Text" ]

Plain text in forwarded mail
===End===================================

Pressing "a", I get to see the html part of the attached text:

===Start=================================
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2024 17:38:34 +0100 (CET)
From: Olaf Skibbe <olaf at kravcenko.com>
To: Olaf Skibbe <olaf at kravcenko.com>
Subject: Mail parts invisible in Outlook
Parts/Attachments:
    1     Shown    1 lines  Text
    2.1.1   OK    ~3 lines  Text (charset: ISO-8859-1)
    2.1.2 Shown   ~7 lines  Text (charset: ISO-8859-1)
----------------------------------------

New added text in forwarded mail.

     [ Part 2.1.2: "Attached Text" ]

HTML text in forwarded mail
===End===================================

This is so far as expected.

I then copied this mail to an exchange mailbox. Looking at the mail with 
the outlook web interface, the mail body only shows:

===Start=================================
HTML text in forwarded mail
===End===================================

The actual mail text by me is not visible. I can access the mail (i.e. 
the very same mail in the same mailbox) via thunderbird and get:

===Start=================================
New added text in forwarded mail.
(horizontal line)
HTML text in forwarded mail 
===End===================================

My question now is, if there is a hint that this could be caused by a 
misbehavior of alpine. Specifically: is the structure of the e-mail as 
shown standard compliant (whatever this means)? I was not able to 
generate this problem by forwarding mails with TB.

I can provide more details if required or an example mail to the list 
showing the issue, but I do not know if attachments are allowed on the 
mailing list.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Olaf