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Adrian Midgley wrote:
I think it will become standard.
I don't. The opposite might happen - the sending machine stores the attachment and waits for requests from recipients - but it won't happen soon.
For a SME/General Practice it replicates what one does with the paper, much of which requires one copy to be filed where it could be found if somebody needed it.
Postfix does has a 'file a copy of all mail here' option (meaning every local users email). Not that it is hard to do, but nice to have it as a handy option.
As far as viruses etc go, it means that the attachments can be held somewhere where there is a local concentration of clue and rules, neither of which reliably apply to/are applied by the average user inside many organisations.
Virus/Malware protection has to be pushed to the desktops. Especially where there is limited clue. Whether that be antivirus tools, patches, or whatever. Especially patches. The rules can be applied centrally without fiddling with email content. You have to build desktops that the (below) "average user" is safe to drive. The trouble with opening the envelope and fiddling with the contents is whatever does this has to know exactly what it is doing - pragmatically it ought to verify signatures (as you can't after it has tampered with the email), handle all types of attachment etc etc. Such a centralist approach smacks of the old mainframe mentality - not that it is necessarily wrong for certain organisations - but it can put a break on creativity and diversity.
It would tend to encourage people back toward sending plain text emails with
the information inside them, rather than using emails as compliments slips
("please see the letter in the attached Word Document")
Attachments are useful - like anything it can be abused - but that is about setting expectations on how to behave - that is management not engineering. The biggest abuse is using email in the absence of a properly designed document management system - unfortunately MS seem determined to convert Outlook and Office into a document management system by feature stuffing products that were never intended for it. The big problem I see with Word document attachments (at least within organisations where Word is standardised) is that very few people seem to bother to patch it. So although we've had very few Word viruses - the potential is there - this extends beyond email attachments into the broader issue of application security. Here the whole industry dies.
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