On Thu, 13 Jun 2013, Jan Kundrát wrote:
On Wednesday, 12 June 2013 20:38:48 CEST, Thomas Lübking wrote:
This cannot be handled by either (domain)filters or a single setting.
Filters are to complex and much of a task and it's also completely
unpredictable what domain will contain the wanted filter or whether
todays url on that domain is nice and tomorrows is evil.
For similar reasons, whitelisting senders won't work - not only would
you have to setup such list, it's also completely worthless due to the
... errr .. weak credibility of that information.
The "domain" I meant was the domain where the images are hosted. In my
opinion, sender addresses are indeed extremely unreliable (and easily faked),
but it's only the trustwortihness of the target image URL which matters.
Presumably, the original poster's setup is that his their colleagues are
sending HTML mail with images referring to remote screenshots, or stuff like
that. Are these screenshots/images/whatever hosted on a single domain?
In my case, looking at $work e-mail (large, 8000+ person company), definantly
not. lots of e-mail are of the 'flyer' variety where the only thing there is an
image, and it's sent and hosted by outside entities.
A single setting is a complete no-go - you'd trap the innocent fools
into downloading mail address verificators.
The question is always "do i trust this mail?" and if so, one could
push a button to download all external resources, but outside all
local environments this BrainFilter™ step is inevitable - it's avery
hostile world out there.
I ten to agree with this. Perhaps the settings could be made persistent for
each already-shown mail -- when the images were loaded once, a special flag
could be certainly set, and when Trojita sees the flag next time, the images
could be loaded automatically. Beucase the IMAP flags cannot be specified by
the sender, I don't see any security problem with this. It would, ohwever,
not elliminate the need to click that button at least once for each mail...
that's useful for when you do say you want images for that mail when it's
optional.
But it should also be possible to set a per-folder flag that will download them
by default.
Note that I am saying this while I prefer to use Pine for my mail client. It's
not that I want to use it this way, but I routinely deal with lots of users who
do. I also filter out a lot of mail without ever opening it. Most Spam is pretty
easy to spot from the from and subject lines.
David Lang
