Post in Better Notification of File Upload in Email Messages

Mar 11 23:24 UTC

In Ticket 248
  https://svn.iopen.net/projects/groupserver/ticket/248
I propose adding the file-upload notification to the email messages as
an attachment. This will cause an attachment-icon to be associated with
the message in the user's email inbox. This is will assist the user to
find the user to find a message with an associated file; it is not
intended to overcome poor writing, where the author of the message makes
no reference to the associated file.

David Wooley was concerned about the proliferation of files that would
result from the system proposed in Ticket 248. I suspect that this
concern was caused by the less-than-full explanation in the ticket,
which I will try and rectify now. The proposed notification will be a
plain-text file that is attached to the email message. The notification
will contain a link to the file on the Web, just like it does now. In
addition, the attachment is given the “content disposition” that causes
the email client to display the file notification in-line, just below
the main message. The user will not have to open or save the
attachment.

We have tried the system, and it works well in Microsoft Outlook, Apple
Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird and Novel Evolution. We found that there is
little practical difference between reading a message with a
file-notification that is an attachment and reading a message that is
currently generated by GroupServer. We will test more systems (IBM Lotus
Notes, Pegasus Mail, Web mail…) we develop this code more.

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.