Fwd: E-mail attachments and local names

[Robert Bihlmeyer <robbe@orcus.priv.at>]

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Hi,

this just came on comp.risks:


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From: rubin@research.att.com (Avi Rubin)
Subject: E-mail attachments and local names
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 17:46:58 GMT

I just had a mildly embarrassing incident because of a Netscape mail
"feature" when sending attachments. I'm sure that other mailers do this as
well. When attaching a file to an e-mail message, the local name of the file
is included in the attachment.  So, the recipient gets to see the contents
of the file, as you would hope, but also the local name that you gave
it. Imagine several possible embarrassing scenarios:

  Attachment: our.most.gullable.client.invoice.doc
  Attachment: proposal.with.doctored.data.xls
  Etc.

It seems that the user should be able to rename the attachment for the
purposes of the message or that the file should just be called attachment1,
attachment2, ...

Avi Rubin

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In gnus, a
<#part ... filename="path/bla" disposition=attachment>
<#/!part>
will also leak the basename of filename ("bla" in this case) into the
message. While I think this is mostly a useful feature, should this be 
made more obvious/intuitive?

        Robbe

-- 
Robert Bihlmeyer       reads: Deutsch, English, MIME, Latin-1, NO SPAM!
<robbe@orcus.priv.at>    <http://stud2.tuwien.ac.at/~e9426626/sig.html>