Post in Better Notification of File Upload in Email Messages

Apr 29 01:31 UTC

On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 23:24 +0000, Michael JasonSmith wrote:
> I dislike placing the file notifications at the top of the document for
> three reasons. First, it is different from standard email, which always
> places attachments at the bottom of the message. My second concern is
> that it does not solve the core problem of the author making no
> reference to the uploaded files in the message, so the reader does not
> have any reason to look at them. My final concern is that it moves the
> notification out of the context of the message, so the reader knows
> little about what the files are and why he or she should look at
> them.

The core of the problem is not, in fact, that the author makes no
reference to the files. I have been in groups where bottom quoting is
common place (because it has, unfortunately, become the standard), and
the *real* problem is that people can't *find* the attachment
notifications, and/or don't know where they should be looking for them.
I've very rarely seen someone forget to say they've attached something.

I propose a 2 fold tweak:

1: replace the file notification with an in-line attachment containing
the file notification (unfortunately we can't attach .url files, because
they have been so badly abused by spammers in the past that outlook now
blocks them by default). This will make it clearer, in *most* clients,
that there is some kind of attachment. It does *not* solve the problem
of not knowing where to look, because is it not necessarily separated
out from the message body when viewing the email.

2: insert a 1 line pre-body banner (as opposed to a header, which has a
different meaning in the email context), saying something like "This
email has had attachments archived, scroll to the bottom to
download" (that isn't optimal wording, but you get the idea).

I don't think the 'standard' argument applies, because archiving
attachments isn't a standard thing, even though it's actually pretty
great (particularly for those of us who heavily use mobile email).
Banner insertions are actually pretty common in corporate mail systems.

I think the argument that the attachment notifications themselves should
*not* go at the top is good. That would just be a real pain, and ugly to
boot (I don't want to have to scroll down through 3 attachments before
getting to the email). A single line is a reasonable compromise I think,
it's no longer than the 'in reply to' banner in a reply anyway.