Support for multipart/mixed on iOS Mail

Question

Support for multipart/mixed on iOS Mail

I subscribed what here is called "Certified Electronic Mail" (italian: PEC - Posta Elettronica Certificata), which has the same value as registered mail.

When I receive an email, I can see all the metadata, but not the message itself, which should be an .eml attachment.

In the footer there's only a message which tells (it's a translation): "This message cannot be shown because of the format used. Ask the sender to send it again using a different format and/or a different email client.

multipart/mixed".

Is it true that iOS cannot read multipart/mixed messages?

My PEC provider uses this format only.

Thank you.

iPhone 3GS, iOS 4.3.1

Posted on May 20, 2011 12:54 AM

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Answer 1

Lukipela

Level 1

0 points

May 20, 2011 9:52 AM in response to PaoloAvezzano

Hi Paolo,

I work for an IT company whose focus is on mailing and PEC systems, so after reading your post I've done some tests with my own PEC accounts.

I've noticed that iOS (test platform was 4.3.3 on an iPhone4) has indeed some problems in reading PEC messages, and this seem to be connected with the multipart/mixed content-type. If you do a quick search in the forums, you will find that this type is infact not supported by iOS , and this is why we are getting the error. During my tests, depending on the PEC Provider that hosted the sender, I got different behaviours: sometimes I didn't get any error at all, but still I was unable to see the postacert.eml attachment containing the text of the original message.

Unfortunately the PEC regulations in Italy force the provider to build the message using this multipart/mixed structure, so I guess we will not be able to read PEC messages on our iPhones until Apple fix this.

By the way, I am going to do some more tests to understand why I am getting such different results depending on the provider. I'll keep you updated should I find a workaround.

Regards,

--

Claudio Tassini

Tech Advisor @Babel Srl

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Answer 2

May 20, 2011 10:08 AM in response to Lukipela

Thanks Claudio,

what would you suggest to ask Apple to fix that?

It's quite annoying to receive just a "reminder" instead of the whole message. It's near to useless this way! 😟

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