Jorey Bump wrote: > This would be unmanageable. It requires the mail client to have > knowledge of the link. How will the link get updated if the attachment > or message is moved to another location? If mozilla has code added to > monitor these changes and act on them, it has moved to a proprietary > mail format. It doesn't matter if the file "validates" as an mbox, for > all practical purposes, it is broken.
If the user has moved the attachment from the default location, then the user has effectively removed the attachment from that E-Mail. The only thing Mozilla would have to monitor is whether or not the link is dead. Eudora users understand this concept. They also understand that if they wish to re-attach a file to a mail all they have to do is copy it back to the appropriate folder. This aspect of it is far simpler than what you would suggest. > I don't think users want to be prevented from organizing their mail, and > I know that I certainly don't want to use a mail client that forces me > to adopt a format that is incompatible with other mail clients. The key > obstacle to your proposal is that it interferes with portability. mbox > requires no conversion. If I decide to switch to another client, or back > up/restore my mail, I don't want to use conversion utilities. I just > want to copy the mbox files. That is exactly what I did when I switched > from POP to IMAP. For the sake of functionality that occurs very rarely the user is left with a mail box that WILL be wiped clean if they recieve the BadTrans virus and are using the single most popular AV package out there. Like the user that posted to this board the other day, having to go through every individual E-Mail to extract the attachments was FAR more of a burden than running a one time conversion utility. If it really comes down to a question of convenience or the ability to file things in a manner in which the user decides, then link text in the mbox file wins hands down. Have you ever needed to extract a couple of hundred attachments from a variety of E-mails? Check out the "Save Attachments" thread a little below this one. You may not realize it, but this is quite a common problem with a wide variety of users. Far more common in day to day usage than moving mbox's around to different machines. For a user such as myself, I'm constantly forced into deleting E-Mail that I would otherwise archive due to a large attachment being a part of it. Even though I would love to keep a record of it, considerations of drive space for both my PC and the server I back up to dictate that I can't keep it. My inability to deal with attachments as seperate entities does not leave me feeling like I am in control of how I wish to deal with my E-Mail. The application is in control, not the user. > Once again, we arrive at the fundamental fact that there is nothing > wrong with the way mozilla stores mail or with the format it uses. > Leaving the attachments in the mbox is not inherently dangerous. By > switching your user to Eudora, you still haven't solved his problem. > Without properly configuring his AV software, who knows where the damage > will occur next? I haven't changed a single setting in his AV software since I converted him over. Since then he's gotten in a stack of all kinds of virii, to include BadTrans. It really has solved his problem. This isn't opinion here, as this is quite measurable in the fact that he hasn't had the entirety of his inbox totally wiped clean twice within one week. Every infected attachment has been erased, with zero nasty side effects. So far as I am concerned, that user's problem is 100% fixed by moving him off of Mozilla Mail and on to Eudora. If any contrary evidence manages to present itself I will reconsider my position on that point. > What if it decides it doesn't like the look of his > registry? Are you going to switch him to Linux? Nope. I have promised (possibly threatened) that the next time he gets his data wiped clean by a virus infecting his system that he was on a one way trip to Mandrake land. :) I'm personally a bit of a FreeBSD zealot, so that may be an option as well. If I did move him over, even KMail has a Eudora conversion utility. It's a relatively simple thing to convert, and it's the single most popular E-Mail client that is not bundled with some other product. As for the possiblity of a registry wipe, I do have to acknowledge that possibility. To date I am not aware of any such glitch with any major AV application that presently exists. MS has a number of fairly clean hooks to clean things out of there. I am aware of a critical dataloss bug concerning a particular mail client though. > I hope so. That would end this discussion. ;) Well, the discussion would move towards a usability issue rather than a dataloss one. Since this is a dataloss issue on Windows, where the bulk of Moz users reside, leaving things as they are does not solve the problem. At least 2 AV apps are interacting disastrously with Mozilla's E-Mail client. A user base of millions with a wide variety of different versions sitting on desktops around the world. Virus definitions are being constantly updated, but not the core engines that cause the problem. It is simply not a realistic solution to just send some bug reports to those AV vendors. Even if they acted on fixing this problem immediately, it would take years to propogate to all the various users out there who might try Mozilla Mail. Either Mozilla needs to find a way to live in harmony with those apps, or data will continue to be wiped clean. I have proposed one possible solution for this which in practice I've seen work quite well on a very popular E-Mail client. This proposal is standards compliant, reasonably portable, and the code to make it happen must already exist, though out of order, in the Mozilla source today. We can also be reasonably certain that any unknown AV apps out there won't interact negatively with it. Any other options exist that actually deal with the problem at hand? The Mozilla InBox is all too vulnerable as it now exists. We either need to come up with a reasonable solution for this, or change the status of the effected bugs to either WONTFIX or EVANG. On this point, there is very little middle ground. As to what the exact solution might be it would certainly help to have more options to pick from. Later on, -- "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx
