On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 09:20:49PM +0100, Noah Slater wrote: > On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 10:21:29AM -0600, lee wrote: > > Well, I'm not trying to mislead someone. Where is defined what an > > attachment is for the context of a MUA, and who made the definition? > > To the best of my knowledge, it isn't defined anywhere. But that doesn't > matter. > The common understanding of an attachment is that it is a file, with a > filename, > that has been sent as a separate item from the message.
Well, then most people have a wrong understanding. > > In Kyles example, that would be saving the html attachment to view it > > in a web browser. The user might do that himself, the MUA might do it > > automatically. If you use a MUA that cannot display text/plain, you > > might save the text/plain to display it ... > > This is NOT a typical use case. Why not? Mutt does it, sup does it. When I have a mail with an html part and want to view that, I can press ENTER on it and mutt and sup will start galeon (Yuck! I need to change that.) to display it. I haven't verified, but I'm pretty sure that the MUA saves the html part as a file so that a web browser can load the file to display it. The MUAs probably do the same with other parts of a mail, unless they can display the part themselves. Since they can display plain text, they're not saving it, but if they couldn't display plain text, wouldn't they handle it the same way they handle parts they can't display themselves? > > And who is to decide how likely a particular user is to save a > > particular attachment, for the purpose of the MUA counting the > > attachments? > > The authors of the MUA. The RFC leaves it up to the user how he wants to display a (part of a) message. And since each user has preferences, it's not up to the authors of the MUA to force the user to display a message in a particular way or to decide what the user would consider as an attachment. > > To me, it has clearly three attachments. It doesn't matter if a user > > is likely to save an attachment or not. > > And you should be free to configure your MUA to display those as attachments, > but the way you think about message parts is uncommon, and would be confusing > for the average user. Yeah, I configured mutt to count all attachments, but mutt doesn't do that. It doesn't go into some containers. Don't get me wrong: Reasonable defaults are fine and should be there, and since its up to each user, it doesn't matter what you or I or most users consider as an attachment. As you say, each user should be free to configure his MUA the way he wants.
