I hate the idea of turning this site in to my own forum, but have an "interesting" problem for you, which might help to have the answer on the internet, so...

I'm in the process of writing code to loop all messages in a Notes inbox, so I can examine their content. Now, consider this document and its Body field:

The Body field is obviously MIME, right?

As confirmed by ScanEz.

If you were to run the following code against the above document, what would you expect to see?

Item item = document.getFirstItem("Body");

if (item.getType()==Item.RICHTEXT){
    System.out.println("Item is Rich Text");
    
} else if (item.getType()==Item.MIME_PART){
    System.out.println("Item is MIME");
    
} else {
    System.out.println("Item is another type");
    
}

Now, I'd expect it to say it was a MIME field. Wouldn't you? But it doesn't. It says it's Rich Text!

I put this down to a quirk and decided to ignore what it was telling me and just go ahead and examine the MIME parts directly. Here's the code I used at first:

session.setConvertMIME(false);

MIMEEntity me = document.getMIMEEntity("Body");

if (null!=me){
    System.out.println("FOUND MIME ITEM!");
} else {
    System.out.println("CAN'T FIND MIME ITEM!");
}

session.setConvertMIME(true);

Why on earth might Notes not be able to find a MIME field when it's obviously there and why might it consider it Rich Text instead? It's driving me spare.

UPDATE: Found the Solution

Ok, here's why it happens. If you combine the two code snippets above, like so:

Item item = document.getFirstItem("Body");

if (item.getType()==Item.MIME_PART){
    session.setConvertMIME(false);
        
    MIMEEntity me = item.getMIMEEntity();        
    if (null!=me){
        System.out.println("FOUND MIME ITEM!");
    } else {
        System.out.println("CAN'T FIND MIME ITEM!");
    }        
    session.setConvertMIME(true);
    
} else {
    System.out.println("Item is another type");
}

This won't work. The code will never get as far as the MIMEEntity bit as Item.getType() will never return MIME_PART.

However, this code will work:

session.setConvertMIME(false);

Item item = document.getFirstItem("Body");

if (item.getType()==Item.MIME_PART){
    MIMEEntity me = item.getMIMEEntity();        
    if (null!=me){
        System.out.println("FOUND MIME ITEM!");
    } else {
        System.out.println("CAN'T FIND MIME ITEM!");
    }        
    
} else {
    System.out.println("Item is another type");
}

session.setConvertMIME(true);

It all comes down to where you turn off MIME conversion for the session. It needs to happen before you look at the types of any field. Makes "sense". I guess. In a kind of it doesn't really kind of way.