GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 111570
Wanted: Some way to delete attachment from stored message
Last modified: 2021-06-01 22:42:17 UTC
This is actually an old idea (was it discussed on the mailing list once?), but it came up again just now when I talked with one of my colleagues about "Sent"-folder clean-up: A simple way to delete attachemnts, or perhaps message parts in general, from messages in mailboxes, would be really useful. We often exchange various types of files with custumers etc. via e-mail-attachments. This often produces messages that are too large to keep, and the files sent are usually stored elsewhere anyway, so there is no point in archiving these in e-mail folders. The inline text parts of the message, however, often contains important information not found anywhere else, so we really want to store these, in other words, keep the messages without the attachments. There are probably one or two roundabout ways to get the desired effect, but some dedicated functionality would be nice.
Note that there is a similar report for the Mozilla Mailer, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2920, and many of its comments apply here, too (let's see who resolves the issue first ;-)) In particular, I like the idea of extending the message part context menu so that it contains: Open [...] [...] Save... Delete Detach As... "Detach As..." would produce the same effect as "Save..." followed by "Delete".
That's a nasty bug entry to read through. Summary: This would be accomplished by using the MIME External-Body Subtype as outlined in RFC 2046 section 5.2.3. As an example, mutt handled this by deleting the original mail and resubmitting the mail with the following extra MIME info which it interprets: > --------------010309060602090402010004 > Content-Type: message/external-body; access-type=x-mutt-deleted; > expiration="Fri, 4 Jan 2002 15:58:38 +0000"; length=1060539 > Content-Type: video/mpeg; name="25097-3566.mpg" > Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 > Content-Disposition: inline; filename="25097-3566.mpg" > > > --------------010309060602090402010004-- As I understand it, this was to avoid complaints about the Message-ID no longer pointing to a pristine copy of the original message if the original were to be modified instead. This would break threading, of course. The alternative is to just extract and replace from the original and not worry about it.
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