+switch must be used twice: once for message/external-body and once
+for the content externally referenced.
+.PP
+By default, the parts of a multipart/alternative part are listed in
+the reverse order of their placement in the message. The listing,
+therefore, is in decreasing order of preference, as defined in RFC
+2046. The
+.B \-prefer
+switch can be used (one or more times, in order of ascending
+preference) to let MH know which content types from a
+multipart/alternative MIME part are preferred by the user, in order to
+override the default preference order. Thus, when viewed by
+.BR mhlist ,
+the ordering of multipart/alternative parts will appear to change when
+invoked with or without various
+.B \-prefer
+switches.
+The
+.B \-noprefer
+switch will cancel any previous
+.B \-prefer
+switches.
+The
+.B \-prefer
+and
+.B \-noprefer
+switches are functionally most important for
+.BR mhshow ,
+but are also implemented in
+.B mhlist
+and
+.B mhstore
+to make common part numbering possible across all three programs.