From: Mark Sidell (mark.sidell@forteinc.com)
Date: Tue Sep 09 1997 - 13:49:15 CDT
On Tue, 09 Sep 1997 19:21:03 +0100, Ian Davis <iand@fdc.co.uk> wrote:
> Simon Lyall wrote:
> > >
> > > We need to have some 'offical' way to join a series of articles
> > together
> > > into one long article. This is one of the things See-Also was used
> > for.
> > > Does MIME offer a better way?
>
> MIME (RFC2046) defines a message/partial subtype which allows large
> messages to be delivered as several separate pieces of mail and
> automatically reassembled by a receiving user agent.
MIME message/partial is great... if you have all of the bodies. But,
in the usenet environment, a client usually needs to find all of the
component messages of a multipart with just the header information, so
that it can then retrieve the bodies for the correct messages if the
user chooses to reassemble and view a multipart message. This means
that a client must be able to assemble the pieces with information
available only in the subject header.
-- Mark Sidell Chief Programmer Forte Agent