🚀 go-pugleaf

Often, it is useful to know details about a MIME format note such
as the number and types of note parts.  For example, it would be
nice to know a new note had 3 parts, text/plain, text/richtext,
and audio/midi.

Naturally, a note's MIME structure cannot be known without completely
reading and parsing the note.  Reading and parsing a MIME note takes
a lot of effort.  It would be nice to save the structure of a MIME note
once the note has been parsed.  Having a "table of contents" for a MIME
note is a win because then the parsing only needs to be done once instead
of every time the note is rendered.

The MIME standard (RFC 1341) does not appear to describe any sort of
table of contents mechanism for summarizing information about a MIME
note in an efficient, easy to process form.  Has anyone addressed the
issue of how to describe, store, and transmit summary information about
a MIME note so that multiple lengthy parses can be avoided?

Thanks for your thoughts,
- William Chung.
IBM Research
T.J. Watson Research Center
whchung@watson.ibm.com