Version: (using KDE KDE 3.2.1) Installed from: RedHat RPMs OS: Linux This is a request for a slight change which will help non-technical users using kmail. The behavior requested combines the features of "Prefer HTML to plaintext" "Allow messages to load external references" and the default behavior of HTML message display. 1) End users do not understand (or care to understand) the concept of the MIME message structure. Thus they would have the message structure viewer on "Show Never". 2) End users like pretty mail. Thus displaying the alternative text part of an email is not a desirable behavior (thus they check "prefer html mail"). Since they don't view the structure, they don't even know how to find the pretty html. 3) Security folks who are responsible for those end users don't like them automagically getting references from the Internet, especially with the preview pane. If HTML is not preferred, an HTML part warns (click here to render). However, if HTML is preferred, there is no warning pre-render. To view the images in one email, the user needs to turn on global external references, which now is automatic in every mail... My suggestion is to have the external reference setting have a third option besides on/off - "prompt". This would display an HTML email without loading any external images (or web bugs). The user would have to click on a "load images" type of button to display the external images. This would allow the end user to get his flashy email but still display spams in the preview pane and not trip web bugs. Behavior wise, messages would display as if "prefer html" was on and "external references" was off - but display the "load images" button. Once that was pressed, the message is displayed as if "external references" was on (for that one view only).
This is the only feature I miss from Mozilla Thunderbird when I use KMail... they have this feature, showing a button in the title of the message saying "show images" when there are references to the internet. I only press that button when I know that mail is 'safe', and comes from people I know. Cheers Marcelo
This is implemented in KDE 3.4. When you prefer html to plain and the message contains references to external images, there is a question if it is ok to download them. That happens in the same way as the question to view in html if you prefer plain above html.