Although being a short-term user of Zorin OS, I'm a big fan of the Evolution mail app, I've enjoyed many of the features it offers. However, there's something I've always felt could enhance the user experience further, especially for those of us who frequently deal with attachments.
I'm looking for a way to enable attachment previews (as icons or thumbnails) within emails in Evolution. Instead of just seeing the generic attachment icon or a list of filenames, I think it would be immensely helpful to have a visual representation, especially for image files, documents, and the like. It not only speeds up the process of identifying attachments but also adds a layer of user-friendliness.
From my past tinkering, here's what I've looked into:
Settings Dive: Checked within Evolution's preferences and settings, but couldn't find a direct option for this.
Plugins: Searched for plugins or extensions that might add this feature, but my search came up short. If anyone knows of any, please share.
I'm optimistic someone might have stumbled upon a method, workaround, or even a patch to achieve this. Or, if it's something not currently possible, perhaps one can suggest how to bring it to the attention of developers for future updates. Zorin OS or Evolution?
You are right; it would be user friendly and helpful. However, there is a good reason why it does not exist. Image Previews in email would require accessing the attached contents and opening it even if the user has chosen to not open that email or file deliberately.
Images can be modified using a binder to bind scripts to the image that run malware. Malware can be encoded to display a certain size that hides the true size of the image. This makes the image appear to be normal hiding that is dangerously large.
They can also alert the sender that their email was accessed and opened; confirming to a phisher or spammer that the account is active.
In both of the above cases, not opening the file is the way to go - and circumventing that would introduce a very glaring security hole.
Thank you for your explanation. There is sure quite an amount of discussion about insecurity of previews.
From user perspective, I see a missed opportunity and limited functionality.
It could be set that previews are triggered and generated only for emails which the user opens and the sender is in contact list. But I see that this is not Zorin issue and it cannot be enabled in Evolution.