This is a follow-up to an older thread that I have just found while searching Google:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=a34idv%24gu718%40ripley.netscape.com&rnum=1 The thread deals mainly with the removal of attachments from mailboxes and security issues. My 2cents is about the usability, not the security aspects, so it's not strictly relevant to the original thread but maybe some developer here will find it useful. My viewpoint is mainly that of a user, however I have attempted to deal with attachment removal in the past (with KMail, which also uses mbox format mailboxes) through the use of a perl script. See: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=pan.2002.05.15.22.18.01.198358.3889%40n0sp4m.brindabella.org Also, I just put in a vote for the following bug number (not cited in the original article): http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9309 I've always been a fan of the way Eudora dumps attachments into a user-specified directory - it allows mailboxes (containing only the text of messages) to be easily backed up. The mailboxes are necessarily small in size (and compress well too) because they don't have all the encoded jpegs/mpegs/powerpoint/M$Word/etc/etc embedded within them. One of the posts in the original thread correctly cites it as a 'killer feature'. It's pretty much the only feature that keeps me stuck on Eudora and it's why i'm yet to find equivalent functionality under Linux (I'm sure the same applies to many others). (I know it can be done with Linux email clients, but not as easily.) The attachments don't need to be dumped *automatically* to achieve this functionality. It would be relatively straightforward, *for users*, to simply select messages that they want to backup and do a "save all attachments" operation on them. If there was a "detach from original messages" checkbox then the messages, stripped of encoded crap, could simply be moved to an empty mailbox for backup. The perl script referred to above operates a bit like this: if it finds a mime part with a file name it dumps the file and replaces the mime part with a new mime part of type text/html. The new mime part contains either a plain text or hyperlinked pathname to the dumped file. In KMail, this allows jpegs etc, to be viewed inline, in the message, if that is the current option for viewing messages. Also, it can be set up to either operate on every incoming message or only on selected messages. (BTW: KMail's ability to filter through an external app. is quite useful.) Could this sort of thing be achieved with a Mozilla plugin? remove ".n0sp4m" to reply
