On 11 Jan 2007 at 16:01, John Howell wrote: > At 12:25 PM -0500 1/11/07, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > >If I were using Eudora, I'd set it to delete attachments when the > >message was deleted. But I always save any attachments that I want > >out to the file system as soon as I see one that I need (my email > >client does not decode them until I tell it to). > > David, I am using Eudora, and wouldn't want the attachments to > disappear with the emails. But more importantly, I don't understand > what you mean about not decoding them until you want. My attachments > sit there happily in their folder until I get to them and open them.
They are in the file system, accessible outside Eudora. In every other email program, that attachments stay encoded in the email and are only decoded and saved *if* you ask for it. If you want to save it, you save it out to an appropriate location in your file system. Then you can delete the email or not, because the file is independent. I don't want to the trouble of having to go to a different folder and muck around with cleaning up the garbage. And I'm not about to store attachments in an attachments folder -- I want to store them in the folder that belongs to the topic the attachments apply to, a client, a Finale project, my web page, and so forth. I can't see any utility in having the files saved to an attachments folder -- you still have to file it somewhere, anyway, and then you have to keep on top of cleaning out the attachments folder. > The ones that come in with SPAM I delete and don't attempt to open. Or > does "decode" mean something entirely different that I don't > understand? Decode means taking the Base64 or MIME or whatever encoding and converting it to the data that it represents and saving it out to the file system. This happens in Eudora, I believe, upon download of the email (rather than upon opening), because I've seen nasties saved out to the attachments folder even when the user didn't open the email. A friend of mine who wasn't too smart was snooping around her hard drive and found her attachments folder and opened some things to see what they were. The result is that her computer was infected, and I had to go over and clean it out, and then explain to her what happened. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
