Re: 2.1.3 Discussion Points

[Albrecht Dreß <albrecht dress arcor de>]

Am 02.06.04 17:06 schrieb(en) W. Michael Petullo:
[snipped current msg part layout]
> An alternative would be to replace the "Message parts" tab with a combo- 
> box.  Rather than display MIME types (text/plain), I think we should  
> display the associated icon for each type.  Something like this might be  
> a simpler way to display the information above (imagine this as a combo- 
> box):
>
> View email as HTML [ envelope icon ]
> View email as text [ envelope icon ]
> View biketran.txt  [ text icon]

I agree with you that the part description as well as the icon can and  
should be improved. Please note, though, that the tree view of the message  
part is a way to show the user the message *structure* in first place.  
Your example was a quite simple one, but think of messages with an other  
message attached, and both of them being pgp/mime signed... You will  
quickly end up with ~15 or more different parts, and the tree view shows  
how they are actually arranged, e.g. which parts are covered by which pgp  
signature. The combo box would be more or less the "flat" solution of  
ancient balsa 2.0 releases (similar like the attachment window when  
composing messages). A nice side effect is that you can select more than  
one part for saving, or display an embedded message, btw.

In the example above, there is actually only one "main" part, and you can  
select in the prefs if you want to display the one the sender regards as  
the primary one or always display the plain one instead of html.

It might be a nice idea to add a part selection sub-popup to the right- 
click msg window menu in the way you suggested. But *please* keep the  
structure view...

> preferences dialog (threading options, etc.).

Threading options are mailbox specific, so the prefs are not the right  
place.

> 4.  The remote content within HTML emails is not displayed.  This
[snipped html description]
> I think this policy needs to be discussed.

Ouch! This would be a security hole, giving spammers (99% of html mail I  
get, btw) a perfect way to at least validate your mail address, and to  
trigger unwanted dial-ins. I am strongly opposed to the idea of  
implementing some kind of auto-loading, even if it does not produce all of  
the well-known problems of broken mua's like [spit] Microsnot Outlook...  
IMHO, there is no good reason to add external contents to html messages  
without a clickable link anyway, so the user knows what (s)he is doing if  
external material shall *really* be loaded. Also note that Balsa supports  
the multipart/external mechanism, which is a great alternative to load  
such stuff (at least the ietf uses it).

Just my € 0.01...

Cheers, Albrecht.



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