Post in Better Notification of File Upload in Email Messages

Better Notification of File Upload in Email Messages From: Dan Randow Date: Apr 29 00:44 UTC Short link

Michael,

The attachment icon in the message header will make it significantly
easier to identify that a post has an attachment, before the email is
opened.

Once the email is open, however, I am concerned that, with your
proposal, there will be "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" and that the
proposal "is not intended to overcome poor writing, where the author of
the message makes
no reference to the associated file." I think that it would be very
useful if we could overcome that problem to some extent.

The current file links require the user to scroll to the bottom of the
email, possibly passing large amounts of excessive bottom-quoting as
they do. Showing the file links there has the same problem as showing
anything else in the message footer. People don't read it.

If the file-link attachments did not display in-line, but showed as file
attachments usually do, then they would be much easier to spot, while
reading an email. My email client, Thunderbird for example, shows a
separate pane below the message, with file attachment icons.

Is there a file-format that we could use that would show as attachments,
and would link quickly to the target files? Would the XML Link File
format (.XLNK) achieve this?
   http://www.t-arn.com/software/XLNK.html

Alternatively, what if it were possible to create a file attachment with
the same mime-type as the target file, that linked to the target file
when opened? As this would look _very_ much like the file was actually
attached to the message, I expect people would find it very easy to use.
It would provide no indication that the file was not actually attached,
but I can't see a major downside to that. Is this anything like feasible?
    

Dan