Quoting Per olof Ljungmark <p...@intersonic.se>:

On 2013-06-12 16:47, Anna Christina Naß wrote:
Zitat von Enrico Scholz <enrico.sch...@sigma-chemnitz.de>:

Hallo,

Are there any plans to (re-)integrate this feature, e.g. add it to
the drop-down menu of the attachment (which only says 'delete' at
the moment)?
Absolutely not.
why not?

Good question!

+1

Everyone here agrees that the old behavior was better.

This is a very incorrect statement. The few people in this thread who have feelings on this disagree, but that doesn't mean the 99% of people using the software agree.

Allowing a user to select whether an attachment is "linked" horribly horribly fails what I call the "Mom test". That test is essentially as follows: would my Mom be confused by the presence of this feature? In this case, the answer is "hell yes".

A regular user is going to have very little/no idea the difference between "linking" an attachment and attaching the actual data. More importantly, why would a user care which method they send with? The question of overhead in this instance is an ADMIN question, not a USER question. An admin is the one in the position to determine whether they a) want to allow hosting of attachments locally, or b) whether they want the overhead of sending large messages (and potentially dealing with the consequences when remote mail servers reject the message due to size limitations).

A user simple cares that the remote user can access the data they are sending. I remain unconvinced that a normal user makes any distinction between the two. And I remain unconvinced that this is worth the overhead to support for the few advanced users that *MIGHT* take advantage of this. (An advanced user might want the option to change the MIME type of an outgoing attachment, for example. This doesn't mean that it makes sense to actually implement and maintain though. Feature creep is very dangerous.)

Not to mention that this feature is not important enough to add to the mobile view. Attachments there must be handled by some admin defined default.

That being said, the "Mom test" is not an inflexible rule. It can be worked around by hiding/moving advanced features to a location that doesn't confuse the normal user. For example - we now allow some advanced attachment actions in dynamic view via a drop-down menu. This drop-down won't confuse the "normal" user since they will just ignore, and the trigger graphic is small enough to be unobtrusive. Compare this with the basic view method of putting giant form input boxes directly next to the attachment data. (The basic compose view is a prime example of how NOT to design a useful UI for a normal user - it is tremendously confusing).

FYI: this confusion has been confirmed by at least one large service provider using IMP, where so many users were confused in the initial rollout with linked attachments that the feature had to be disabled.

michael

___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slus...@horde.org]

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