The advantage with Content-Disposition is (a) files are available
locally and need not be fetched from the net (b) no problem with
private messages.
With Content-Disposition, files included in the message will be
fetched locally, but this doesn't preclude use of absolute URLs
in the text/html part which will then be fetched from the net.
Private messages can however be accomodated for
by putting a random password into the URL, so that only those who
have the URL can get the message.
Yes, but if you don't already have a web server set up to do this,
(and a mechanism to allow the sender to make files available via
that server to the intended recipients) this is a pain. For example,
our users can set up a ~/www-home directory, put their web pages
there and advertise them at http://www.cs.utk.edu/~user/whatever.
But we have no provision for them to set up password protection
on the stuff they put there.
Not highest degree of security,
but normal Internet mail does not provide high security. For high
security, special security functions should be available.
Both are weak security, but they are different kinds of security.
My choice is still to use Content-Location, since this will work
with existing mail systems and existing web browsers without any
change at all.
Except that mail readers don't recognize content-location, so there
is no benefit to including those parts in the message in the short term.
Long term, once there's a URN registry in place, I'd prefer to have
Content-URN over Content-Location. This could even replace Content-ID,
since one kind of a URN is basically a Content-ID (modulo syntax changes)
plus a resolution service.
(The only facility needed is that the mail system
can save "Text/HTML" parts in a file.) The Content-Disposition
solution requires more changes to the mail system to work reasonably
well.
Yeah, basically it assumes that current mail systems will offer to
store files under their Content-Disposition filename. This is true
for a few systems, but Content-Disposition isn't widely deployed
yet. Later ones will recognize multipart/related and create a special
directory to store those files.
Keith