Re: lynx-dev Redirection in E-mail headers?

[Klaus Weide]

On Mon, 13 Dec 1999 address@hidden wrote:

> Hello, Lyncei,
> 
> Is there a convention for formatting an E-Mail message so that
> when it is opened it launches a viewer and displays a page not
> contained in the message body?  Logically, this might be
> as simple as a header:
> 
>     Location: http://host/path
> 
> and a dummy body.  But what of "Content-type:"?

Are you talking about tweaking Lynx to do this, or in general?

If the first -

You can trick Lynx into treating a file with a message (mail headers +
body) somewhat like an HTTP response.  My patch for redirection handling,
which isn't yet in the latest dev.16 code, would make it easy to add
following of a Location.  Let me know if you want details.  But this is
of course completely non-standard.

If the second -

There is no standard for *automatically* following a Location header in
mail.  A mail client better not do that!  Good luck with trojan mail...

But MIME has something more or less equivalent - see the MIME RFCs for
"message/external-body".


In HTTP, the Content-type (and probably all other Content-* headers)
is irrelevant, if the message is a redirection (according to the HTTP
response code) AND there is a Location header AND the client is following
the redirection.  Content-type in a redirection message comes only into
play if the clients doesn't follow the redirection (it is always free to 
do that - see Lynx's -noredir flag) and decides to display the contents
instead.


   Klaus