[VM] MIME displaying errors

[Uday Reddy]

This is a bit of a tricky issue.

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.

It seems to me that this kind of aggressive error recovery is not 
desirable.  But this is the behavior that VM has always had.  Does 
anybody know why VM was designed to work this way?

Cheers,
Uday