Coin,

I tried this plugin to read an attached ms-tnef:
   [winmail.dat  application/ms-tnef (2084241 bytes)]
and ended up with the following unclickable display:
   [MCITP(rgb)_538_1416_1313]

I then found the original attachment have been replaced by three
application/octet-stream, in fact containing images included in the
forwarded mail.

Honestly, having no proper display of the forwarded mail and even no
MIME type recognition of the inner attachments make this plugin almost
useless for most people. I won't make this BR release critical, but i do
think this plugin needs a lot more work and should not have been
included in a Debian release.

Regards.

severity 689399 wishlist
forwarded 689399 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mail/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2742
thanks

  Hi Marc,

  Feature requests are wishlist, not important, and you're reporting
usability enhancements, not failures of the current code.

  Request 1: clickable replacement, for quicker access, I suppose. Though
in case of multiple contents this would require some sort of selector
window, probably.

  Request 2: MIME type recognition. I assume you request this because
the tnef blob contains such info. Othewise would be more complicated.

  Request 3: proper display... well, this could be automatic if previous
is implemented, I believe.

  It's clear it doesn't work as you expect, but that doesn't make it
unsuitable for everybody else, as you suggest. In fact seems it helped
you to deal succesfully with a tnef attachment (again, not as you wished,
but somehow), so, while your feedback is appreciated and this will be
forwarded upstream, this kind of conclusion is pretty absurd to me.

  regards,

Coin,

Working in computer science i was able to deal with this plugin, but i
don't think a non-geek person would be able to use it at all. Debian is
a universal OS and we should work for most users, and they would surely
be lost when they don't see any proper attached mail. It is not trivial
to guess which software to use to open an application/octet-stream and
most people would just be disappointed.

I, as a DD, consider this plugin of insufficient quality for
"normal"/non-geek people, and i consider it a bug and not a wish because
the only goal of this plugin/package is defeated for the intended
audience of both Debian and the users of claws-mail (which is not an
obscure adminsys or dev tool).

You downgraded this br, so be it. Please note i fully disagree. Nothing
personal.

Regards.

  Hi Marc,

  No user has ever complained such way, and I don't think you're the
only user of this package (http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=claws-mail-tnef-parser), so I still think the problem is what you were
expecting, not the software itself. Which, as said, has a lot of room
for improvement, of course.

  Universal means for all, not for most. That includes geeks, childs,
90 year old grandmas and whatnot. And not all software have to work
for all of them as every one of them expect. That's not only absurd
but impossible.

  The goal of this plugin is to parse tnef attachments, and the intended
audience are claws-mail users which have to deal with them. Normality is
a not a good concept to mix here. That it has required you more effort
to do it than the one you were expecting doesn't mean this is happening
to the rest of users. So, are these users not "normal"?

  Claws Mail has never been a mailer for the masses, and from what I see
on the upstream mailing list, the "normal" user can be a lot more geeky
than you or me. Maybe we should remove also Claws Mail from Debian
because most of people won't be able to use it. And while at it remove
also mutt, doesn't even have a wizard to configure my account on first
run, dow does that people expect my father to use it?
  See what happens when you only want software for "normal" people? :-P

  Yep, I've already guessed that :)

  And, while I have your attention, I think the manpage could be improved
to detail usage and what's expected from this plugin. Since I don't use it,
would you like to provide a couple of paragraphs to add to the usage section
of the manpage?

  thanks in advance,

I would like to report that I to have a problem with this plugin.

If you know which document is in the winmail.dat (since the content is
not displayed) then you can open it by selecting the correct program.
Otherwise you have to "try and error" with all available programs you
have until it works.

The only thing I want from the parser is that the content is displayed
in a way where you can see the file-type.

I was specially surprised because the "screen-shots" showed the correct
file-type where in real live this is not the case.
My solution for now is to save the winmail.dat and open it with tnef.