problems viewing attachments in emacs ui

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 07/29/2013 07:07 AM, David Bremner wrote:
> Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins at finestructure.net> writes:
> 
>> I'm now realizing that my problem with html parts is probably that
>> browser is attempting to open the temporary file in the background.
>> When the browser call returns, the caller assumes the application is
>> done with the temp file and purges it.  So for this issue at least I
>> need to either convince my browser to not open the file in the
>> background, or tell emacs to cleanup temp files at some later time
>> (session termination, for instance).
> 
> I didn't have time to think through the consequences, but the following
> kludge seems to let the browser start:

hm.  there are some pretty serious consequences to feeding arbitrary
html to your web browser via a file:/// URL.  In particular, your
browser might execute arbitrary javascript (which itself can interact
with the rest of your web browsing history and/or logged-in sessions),
and might fetch data from outside sources (leaking at least information
about when and from where you read your e-mail, and potentially other
things).

The consequence of commenting out the file deletion is that you start to
fill up your tmpdir with a bunch of crufty old files :)

One other approach that would address some of these other issues might
be to open the html in a separate, temporary profile for your web
browser, one that doesn't directly interact with your main web browsing
profile (or any other browser profile).  This would also have the
advantage of not terminating until the browser profile is closed.

I know that chromium offers as --temp-profile argument that behaves this
way.  I'm not sure how to do it with iceweasel -- you could do it
manually, with a combination of -ProfileManager and -no-remote, then
create a new profile, and then when done clean it up afterwards
manually, but that sounds like a real pain.

hth,

	--dkg

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