All around the world, it probably happens billions of times a day. It's getting late and I want to go home so I email the document I'm working on to my personal account. Or maybe I'm sitting at two computers in the same room and just need to get the file from one to the other. This isn't just about sending a file from one person to another. Often I'm trying to share it with myself! I end up with many copies of the same file floating around and its hand to find the most current one. My email quota gets filled up with file attachments in my Sent Mail folder.
At the same time, I often click on MIME attachments in my email to open documents that I want to edit. The file is actually saved to a temp folder or the desktop and if I open the document multiple times I can end up with multiple copies of the document. After I save the document, it can be hard to figure out which file I was actually editing and I often forget to move it from the temp folder or desktop to a more permanent location.
I want to be able to just drag and drop a file from my desktop into my email client without going through the hassle of composing a new message and typing in my email address and a subject line. I want to be able to "open" one of these files, make some changes and then just hit save - without having to worry about where temp files were placed or how to get it back up into my email and without creating additional copies of the attachment.
One possible implementation would be to have an email message with new MIME type that would indicate that the message was a document with no message body. A text part could be attached that would explain this in plain english so that an older email client would be able to display the message as a text message with an attachment. But smarter email clients would recognize that it is just a document and display it differently - a file icon instead of a message icon and the document name in the subject area. Double clicking the message would download the document to your local machine and open it with the appropriate application - but when I save the document it would transparently get uploaded back to the mail server, replacing the one I downloaded (over IMAP).
Well in a way the online office apps developments have gotten us partially there. You no longer need to forward an attachment around, just the link. But this still poses a problem when you want to actually edit a file on your desktop.
I think another option is to use or extend the HTTP PUT protocol and make the OS natively aware of that protocol so that files can be retrieved and saved regardless of location.
Then we can add the MIME extension that you've proposed to identify that the attachment is a "virtual attachment" and to retrieve/save the file using the provided identifiers.
Posted by: Justin Khoo | June 06, 2008 at 06:02 PM
Hmm.. apprently there's already WebDAV... so perhaps a WebDAV header?
Posted by: Justin Khoo | June 06, 2008 at 06:06 PM
This would, of course, also be a fairly trivial extension to IMAP (even though it is arguably too cluttered with other "trivial extensions"). It could even be done entirely as a client activity if the client contained a mechanism for generating a standard, minimal, set of headers, perhaps letting the user supply enough keyword or other information for the subject line to identify the file.
The difficulty with using the more conventional mail infrastructure this way is that SMTP needs sender and destination info (reverse and forward paths) and, at least since MIME, a set of headers. From your description, what you want to do is to drop something directly into a folder that you already own, not actually mail it. And, for that, IMAP or some close relative would seem to be the right sort of model.
FWIW, I used to mail documents to myself all the time in the way you describe, but haven't done so for 15 or 20 years or more. I have used an IMAP server in tricky ways, but most often, and without particularly thinking about it, have returned to the sorts of things I did before I started using mail that way -- [s]ftp to a handy server, copies to removable media and sneakernet, access to network-based backup or shadow devices,... So I wonder what is different between your environment and mine that leads to these different habits.
john
Posted by: John Klensin | June 09, 2008 at 04:59 PM
A good informative post indeed and fully agree with your view.
Appreciate your blog and awaiting to read more.
Posted by: Luxury Vacation | January 31, 2011 at 04:58 AM