Bug 81853

Summary: Opening of attachments for editing is potentially confusing for novices, and may lead to loss of data.
Product: [Unmaintained] kmail Reporter: Bronson Philippa <neo_bp>
Component: message listAssignee: kdepim bugs <pim-bugs-null>
Status: REOPENED ---    
Severity: wishlist CC: bugsnmd
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Debian stable   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Bronson Philippa 2004-05-19 12:42:13 UTC 
Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.2.2)
Installed from:    Gentoo Packages
Compiler:          gcc (GCC) 3.2.3 20030422 (Gentoo Linux 1.4 3.2.3-r1, propolice)  
OS:                Linux

Many users create a document at work or on a different computer and then email the attachment (eg, a word document) to their personal email address to work on it at home. When receiving such a message in kmail, the user will click on the attachment at possibly choose to open the file. Kmail places the attachment into a temporary folder and then executes an external program (such as OpenOffice).

If the user then edits that document and saves it, any changes they make will be lost when closing the file (unless they save it to a different directory). 

*** I recently observed a novice user lose several hours of work because of this issue. This was not the first time they had lost data by editing opened attachments ***

I would recommend that kmail change the file permissions on the temporary file to disallow writing to the file. The external editor would display the file as read-only and the user couldn't possibly lose data.

A warning explaining why the file was read-only might also be useful.
Comment 1 earlgrey 2004-09-29 04:14:52 UTC 
currently attachments are set to readonly
Comment 2 Bram Schoenmakers 2007-03-10 20:24:33 UTC 
Opened attachments are readonly these days.
Comment 3 NMD 2024-01-10 16:41:36 UTC 
Hi,
I am experiencing this on Debian Stable, Kmail 5.22.3. I can open and edit attachments directly from the message list, and even save them, but then once you close them this is entirely list.
I also experienced a bug whereby I could save a document, then open from within Kmail, and then after saving and closing Kmail would delete this. However I cannot reproduce this.
Cheers