[MlMt] Automatically stored attachments

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 29 May 2014, at 17:09, Luca Allodi wrote:

> All the attachments "quicklook'd" in MailMate are stored in 
> ~/Library/Application Support/Mailmate/Attachments.
>
> Depending on correspondence volume, this may stack up to several GBs. 
> More importantly, confidential attachments to (GPG-)encrypted e-mails 
> are stored there as well until the email is (if ever) deleted. This is 
> an insecure behaviour that some may desire not to happen.
>
> I'm not sure whether this is a common issue, but in general I see the 
> "Attachments" folder as a temporary directory, not as a permanent 
> storage location (especially for encrypted attachments).

Yes, this folder is a cache which is unfortunately not as temporary as 
it should be.

> Is there a way to avoid this? Is this an issue for other users as well 
> or is it only me?

No, this is how it works and it is not (yet) configurable. There are 
several things I would like to change for the Attachments folder and 
deleting old items is one of them — perhaps based on how long ago the 
corresponding message has been viewed (and this could then be 
configurable). Maybe encrypted attachments should have a separate 
setting.

But this is not trivial. Two potential problems:

* MailMate might delete an attachment which is currently being viewed by 
a different application (in practice this might not be a problem if 
deletion is done long after the email has been viewed).
* The user might have made changes to the cached attachment (I could 
check this before deletion).

I guess one easy option could be to offer to save attachments in a 
temporary folder which is deleted when restarting the computer, but I 
doubt that would be sufficient for you.

-- 
Benny