From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: improve rmail's MIME handling Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:14:12 +0900 Message-ID: <87eia35wqj.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <83r5e874ab.fsf@gnu.org> <83d3poaihf.fsf@gnu.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1291194566 637 80.91.229.12 (1 Dec 2010 09:09:26 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 09:09:26 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Eli Zaretskii , handa@m17n.org, monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: rms@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed Dec 01 10:09:21 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1PNigh-0008PA-IJ for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 01 Dec 2010 10:09:21 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:39061 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1PNhSd-0007Dq-Fn for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 01 Dec 2010 02:50:43 -0500 Original-Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=57156 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1PNfuw-0008Pp-IX for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 01 Dec 2010 01:12:05 -0500 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1PNGzq-0005z5-0J for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:35:14 -0500 Original-Received: from [130.158.254.170] (port=43512 helo=dmail01.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1PNGxR-00050k-Rn; Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:35:12 -0500 Original-Received: from imss12.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp (unknown [130.158.254.130]) by dmail01.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8A3FAE06EA; Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:14:48 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: from imss12.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp (imss12.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp [127.0.0.1]) by postfix.imss71 (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6B1822AF543; Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:14:28 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: from mgmt1.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (unknown [130.158.97.223]) by imss12.cc.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5CC052AF542; Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:14:28 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) by mgmt1.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5A33D3FA0548; Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:14:28 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 6EC9611F034; Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:14:12 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: X-Mailer: VM undefined under 21.5 (beta29) "garbanzo" ed3b274cc037 XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6 (newer, 3) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:133262 Archived-At: Richard Stallman writes: > It's ok to enable mime handling in Rmail by default if it is done in a > convenient way. A convenient way is one that helps without forcing > itself on you, without switching buffers unless you request it. I hope it's OK to create a presentation buffer for the current message. > It has to let you read textual attachments in the message > buffer itself. For text/plain and text/richtext, VM does this by default without problem (modulo doing it in a presentation buffer rather than in the original message buffer). This may be hard for text/html, at least if you get mail from people using non-Emacs MUAs. There's good reason why people push HTML mail out to specialized browsers. > It should not try to decode the non-textual attachments until you ask > for specific ones. By popular demand, VM switched from that approach to decoding images by default. Of course this can be switched off, and the list of MIME media types to automatically display is configurable. The point: if RMail is going to continue to be the preferred MUA of a tiny minority, switched off by default is probably OK. But if the intent is to make Rmail attractive to average users, you'd better poll users on this. > I would suggest making the non-textual attachments invisible, showing > only their header lines. It's better to have a single summary line. The header lines of body parts are often complex and uninformative (eg, the media subtypes and content-type parameters rarely matter except to the decoding programs). Users want to know media type, file name, and content description, which should easily be abstracted into 10 + 20 + 40 = 70 columns in most cases. More important is checks that file name extensions match media type, and that magic numbers match media type (usually the underlying library gets that right, but sometimes not, and Emacs does implement some types in Lisp). Those are not easy for users to do. > If you want to see the contents of one, you type v on it. Yep, that's the VM model, except that the default action (often but by no means always = view) is activated by RET, and $ is a prefix key that introduces bindings for alternative actions (including view, save (which may have multiple variants, eg, for message/rfc822 parts or for application/* parts with multiple decoder implementations), and sometimes others).