Attachment proposals

From: Kent Landfield <kent_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 10:52:40 -0500 (CDT)
Message-Id: <199806111552.KAA26823_at_landfield.com>


Question of the day:

Is there a need for Hypermail to provide users with the ability to configure external programs to decode certain mime types ? And would you use it ?

What follows is the summary of proposals concerning attachments. I'd like to hear from others as to how you feel. If you don't want to post to the list then please drop me a note. I suspect that file naming and external mime decoding will be the biggest areas of discussion. ;)

       printcomment() will be used to indicate if a message
       contains attachments.  It will be in the message information 
       content block at the top of the message.

           <!-- attachment="filepath1" -->
           ...
           <!-- attachment="filepathN" -->

       The content-transfer-encoding stuff should be undone and the 
       things saved as binary (not base64 etc).

       If the MIME type is known, adding an extension to the file when 
       it is saved to disk would aid a browser in processing the file 
       with a helper application upon retrieval.
 
       This proposal is satisfied if Proposal #5 is implemented.

       For security reasons, *all* binary attachments should be 
       written to disk with file permissions of 444 or equivalent 
       read-only access and should *never* allowed to be executable.

             <a href="budget.doc">budget.doc</a>

       2. It is possible to configure where attachment names are
          stored. The current options are in the current archive 
          directory or in a single subdirectory of the current 
          archive directory.

       The user should be able to control the use of attachments by:

  1. Indicating if attachments are stored in separate files from the original message. (Turn it on or off.)
  2. Indicating which mime types should not be stored at all. (i.e. vcard attachments)
  3. Specifying a list with 'preferred' content-types when receiving/decoding mixed/alternative attachments
  4. Indicating which content-types of images that is preferred to get in-lined - <img> instead of <a href>.
  5. Specifying external programs for decoding of certain content-types/Content-Transfer-Encodings ? (Security issues here).
-- 
Kent Landfield                        Phone: 1-817-545-2502             
Email: kent_at_landfield.com             http://www.landfield.com/
Email: kent_at_nfr.net                   http://www.nfr.net/
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Received on Thu 11 Jun 1998 05:54:00 PM GMT

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