--On Tuesday, May 02, 2000, 9:01 AM -0500 "Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu>
wrote: 

> 
>> IMHO, MIMEPart should be renamed MIMEDocument. It is a Composite,
possibly
>> containing other MIMEDocuments. MailMessage should be reserved for, well,
>> mail messages. Maybe it could go.

In the correspondents framework, there's the following hierarchy:


            NetMessage (1)
               EmailMessage (2)
               NewsMessage (3)

> Sounds reasonable.  The only odd situation is data+headers vs. data w/o
> headers.  Currently we have MIMEDocument when there are no headers, and
> MailMessage which is a MIMEDocument plus some headers.  Note, by they

Well, one sor tof MIMEDocument + headers, right?

> way, that a multipart message doesn't make sense unless there is at
> least one header to specify the separator string.  So, a multipart
> MIMEDocument right now is a really useless critter, because you can't
> separate the parts.

But having minimal headers merely to specify separator string doesn't make
one a mail message, does it?

> So MIMEDocument should have at least one header.  But once you do that,
> why not just add a full complement of headers?  If that one header is
> legitimate, then it came from a real header and it can't hurt to record
> those other headers along with it.

Unless you're making something that might have a variety of different
headers depending on how it gets served. Then you might very well *want* to
have a minimal set of headers, and convert on demand.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.