Misleading yank attachment button

[Uday Reddy]

When a message with attachments is quoted (yanked), vm-mime-yank-attachments governs whether the attachment is yanked or not. At the moment, when the flag is nil, the mail buffer appears as if the attachment is included. Conversely, when the flag is t, the it appears as if the attachment is not included. This is confusing! (However, the inclusion/exclusion of the attachment in the mail message appears to be correct. It is just the mail buffer display that is misleading.)

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Notes:

- See Bug #494521 for some prior discussion.
- The revision 453.6.58, dated 2008-10-17, is the culprit. It has the description "Yanking of messages uses the same MIME decoding as the presentation now." vm-yank-message has new implementation in this revision, which supposedly uses the same decoding as the presentation. The variable vm-included-mime-types-list is being ignored after the revision.

Perhaps the old implementation should be reinstated.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Blueman comments on how images are handled (vm.info, 2010-07-30)

If I do it from a text-based emacs window where the picture is just
referenced as a button, then the inclusion is somewhat right in that at
least it looks the way it does in the original email. The included text
looks like:
 > Test with picture
 >
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 > JPEG image [Press RETURN to save to a file]
 >
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 > This is a test

However the "button" itself is no longer there (this is just text) and
therefore the "Press RETURN" is meaningless either in the reply buffer
or in the resulting sent email. Ideally, though it would be
better if the line looked something like
        DELETED JPEG image: file_name.jpg
signaling that there was originally an attachment that has been deleted
from the replied email.

If I have vm-mime-yank-attachment set to 't' then it works
perfectly. The button is preserved in the reply buffer and is sent
along as a functioning attachment in the actual sent email.

If I do it from a graphical frame-based emacs window where the picture
is displayed inline, then the inclusion is a lot messier. The included text
looks like:

 > Test with picture
 >
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 > +-----+
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > |image|
 > +-----+
 >
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
 > This is a test

where I believe each |image| line corresponds to a line band of the
image. This is more clearly wrong.

Again I think the behavior should be as suggested above - single line
saying something like:
        DELETED JPEG image: file_name.jpg

EVEN WORSE, if I set vm-mime-yank-attachments, then the picture is
yanked and shows up graphically inline in the reply buffer BUT it is NOT
actually attached when the reply is sent - THIS IS CLEARLY A BUG I
THINK. The resulting replied/forwarded email just has multiple lines
saying |image|, identical to the case where vm-mime-yank-attachment is
nil. I.e. the attachment is never actually yanked.

I presume that other types of displayed or non-displayed MIME
attachments should be handled similarly.

More generally, it seems like we have the following cases of
replying/forwarding messages:
     reply/forward with/without included text and with/without attachments
Plus we have
     vm-forward-message (but no vm-reply-message) that forwards the
     entire message as a single MIME attachment.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Revision 1013 fixes the problem.

However, it would be nice of proper MIME buttons are shown when an attachment is in the composition buffer. This seems to work for XEmacs, but not FSF Emacs.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Revision 1076 makes the attachment buttons look innocuous when vm-include-mime-attachments is nil.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Revision 1082 makes the attachment buttons look like stuff when vm-include-mime-attachments is t.