Is there a way to know which Content-Type is the body of System.Net.Mail.MailMessage?

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hello, i'm a bit in a dead end here.
i have the following EML:

this is part of my eml file:

------=_NextPart_001_0046_01CD587D.979ABFF0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

aaaaaaaaaaa

------=_NextPart_001_0046_01CD587D.979ABFF0
Content-Type: text/html;
	charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<html xmlns:v=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" =
...
...

as you can see, i have a body (which is HTML), and an alternate view (plain text).
outside plugin parses the entire EML into a MailMessage object.

the problem is, i have no idea what type is my body? (it can be html/plain/richtext/xml).

the MailMessage has isBodyHtml, which is fine to know if its html, but if its false - then it can be either plaintext/richtext/xml, and i need to know what is it

any help will be appreciated.
thanks!

Posted 15-Aug-12 6:08am

arielbeck

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Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

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**Zoltán Zörgő** · Answer 1 · 2012-08-15T07:12:00

As it comes from another party you can not rely on mime types told it.
Sniffing a data stream to determine it's content type is not easy. It relies on the file signature knowledge base, described here: http://www.garykessler.net/library/file_sigs.html[^]

There is a FindMimeFromData() function in the urlmon.dll, but that is unmanaged code, thus you need PInvoke, see: http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/msgs/26/133278.aspx[^]. It has it's limitations, it can detect only 26 mime types. In linux there is an implementation called "magic numbers[^]".

This might be also interesting for you: A small Content Detection Library[^]

TorstenH. · Answer 2 · 2012-08-15T22:16:00

Solution 3

You can detect whether it is html or plian text - that's right.
But Email does originally not support more foramts than HTML and plaintext.

SO what you can do is to treat each plaintext message like it's a richtext. That way, richtext is processed correctly and plaintext is also represented correctly.

Now to the XML:
That one is a bit hard to detect. How well formatted is your XML? is it in the bodytext? IN that case you should be able to find a in the first row of text.

Can't it be added as an attachment? Would be easier and safer for you to work with.

Posted 15-Aug-12 22:16pm

TorstenH.

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arielbeck 22-Aug-12 3:36am

thanks for your answer :)
1. emails do support more than plain and html, (for example - in outlook u can create a rich one).
2. i will add what you said about richtext, tho right now the "viewer" supports only plain
3.i cannot add it to the attachment, because i receive the SMTP request, so i have no way to manipulate it when sending it, it can be anything.

it seems that there is no way to know, at least with .NET MailMessage, what is the body type in case of non-html.

TorstenH. 22-Aug-12 5:10am

You should take a look at Thunderbird and how it works with attachments and different styles of body.
It tries to displays attachments after the original bodytext. SO if you have an attachment which is XML, you could just parse it and display the content (or whatever to do with it).

But to ask: What do you do with the email? display, send, receive, process/manipulate?

arielbeck 22-Aug-12 5:23am

mostly parsing it, eventually, the body will be displayed in a viewer (which only supports plaintext right now).

TorstenH. 25-Aug-12 6:56am

Then make it the thunderbird way.
I had a similar task quite a while ago where I had to display a certain type of report directly. SO I checked the attachments for a binary attachment and if the file extension was correct I started the rock'n'roll.

arielbeck 28-Aug-12 4:53am

but i'm not handling attachments, i handle the body.