Are we going to permit 'inadvertently shed" fingerprints also?

Oh, wait...

Why trust users to know what file extensions are "safe" and which are not? Surely the same computer that shows "ImportantFile.doc" to the user when it's really "ImportantFile.doc.exe" can be smart enough to pop up a message when someone clicks on it: "Hey, this filename *looks* like a document, but it's really an executable so instead of opening a document, I'm going to run it. It's probably a terrible idea to run it, so I'm not going to do it, you'll have to rename it to something less ambiguous if you really want to run it. But you should't do that. Really. I'm not kidding."

The people that find visible file extensions to be useful are the same people that know how to change the default setting to show them -- for the rest of the world, file extensions are meaningless, they'd rather see the MS Excel icon on Excel Docs than have to remember what file extensions will open into an Excel doc.

There speaks somebody who's not managed other systems, presumably.

"My Documents" is stupid when it's not even a document-storing account. Local Administrators having My Documents is stupid. Plus, then, they aren't My Anything. They are Company Documents.

That aside, I rename My Computer (or, nowadays, create a shortcut to the same) to This PC. It just makes more sense, whether you are at home or at work.

On top of that, the My Document folder is full to the brim of "CompanyName" folders for every concievable software manufacturer on any PC you've used for more than a day. Most of "My Documents" isn't close to "My" at all - I'd rather they weren't in there whatsoever, because everything thinks it has the right to throw junk into My Documents under a folder all its own (because, at one point, My Saved Games, etc. didn't exist).

On top of that, My Documents INCLUDES My Pictures. They're both types of documents. But, oh no, one defaults to one location and one to another. Stupid. Microsoft's fix is indexing and collation of all these places into one huge globular - but temporal - mess where you can have multiple copies of the same document/photo appear.

On top of THAT, if you ever browse a newly-setup server and go to the User areas (I separate Profiles and Documents, but some people don't), you'll see a thousand "My Documents". Because it's a fake name applied by desktop.ini and the like to any document folder. Want to get into a particular user? You have to turn off buckets of options, type their username in manually, or show another column - the REAL name of the folder.

So now we're breaking stuff out of Documents and putting it in Pictures - is that part of the user profile (and thus needs to be downloaded to every client they log onto), or is that a storage area that can be pushed off with Folder Redirection to a network share? Okay, what about My Data Sources? What about My Videos? What about My Saved Games? What about My Third-party Things That Some Program Created In The Profile Folder?

Can you redirect them all? Not easily. And why is Downloads outside of My Documents? Surely that's a bulk-storage area that you don't need to download to every client every time you logon?

It's a damn mess. Yet, in base AD, we have two options - Profile Path and Home Path (not even called My Documents!). Everything else is GPO and Folder Redirection.

So now when you backup your home laptop, you have to get not only My Documents but My Pictures, My Videos, My DVD-Rips created by some freeware, etc. too. Or you have to backup the entire User folder, which is a massive waste and includes - amongst other things - your registry which isn't necessarily portable.

To you it's "just a name". To a sysadmin it's a bunch of junk that's slowly getting out of hand and there's few sensible ways to organise it.

And yet all the user cares about is "magical, mystical special settings I should never play with" (Profile!), and "all my stuff" (which they can arrange how they want into subfolders of their own choosing) (Home!).

This PC, This Network, Profile and Home. Universal, not personal/business specific, not unbelievably twee and unnecessarily humanising, and been the basis of user accounts for decades.

But no, "My CDBP Projects" or whatever the ones that keep reappearing in my profile/document folders (at random it seems!) whenever I run some bit of freeware are the way to go...

Because something system-level with access to run the file (presumably) has to apply regexp's to almost it's entire contents to correctly determine the type of it (e.g. is it a ZIP or is it a JAR with the same compression?).

It'd be trivial to generate a DOS of some kind by just feeding it a malformed file.

Which involves some system-level process opening every zip-compressed file, peeking into its contents and performing the equivalent of "file" regexp searches throughout its content to tell you that it is, in fact, an OOXML or JAR file rather than just a ZIP of the same.

The processing overhead and security requirements of the basic OS file-managing processes just went up an order of magnitude.

Tell them to use a half-decent browser that won't let you run executable-named files from the browser anyway. Or at least put up horrible click-through warnings when you do.

Because it's a stupid idea.

If the extension determines something that the user should be aware of (what program will open it), then it needs to be shown, and modifiable to correct mis-identified files.

If the extension is merely a nice name, then the user need not care about seeing it or knowing it and should be able to change it at will.

Sadly, in Windows, the extension determines what program is associated and therefore opens a file (and, in part, whether it's executable!). It's encoding a file attribute into the name itself, which is a "layering" violation as far as I'm concerned.

Ideally, the mimetype would be associated with the file metadata and be as easily changeable as the name (e.g. drop-down box to "change" the file type it's interpreted as whatever the extension), but that's a nightmare that no sensible OS seems to have tackled. It wouldn't be that hard to "default" the mimetype to whatever the "file" utility detects it at on introduction of a new file, but nobody seems to want to do that.

Similarly,the "dot-hidden" files of Linux suffer the same fate. Just the name determines a kind of file attribute, which is silly and potentially dangerous or confusing ("I renamed it .jpg and it disappeared!").

While we're still using OS that trust and encode the filetype into the filename itself, we need the facility to change the detected filetype, and the facility to view the detected filetype. Hiding extensions only achieves the later (with a separate file type column, "Adobe Reader Document", etc.). Any cleverness with showing the extension on rename where it wasn't showing before will mean the user will strip out the file attribute when they rename over the top, and not showing the extension makes it more difficult to change what it opens in.

We created this problem back in the 8.3 filename days and NEVER properly solved it. Encoding metadata into the filename is the cause. Removing it is the solution. But without the infrastructure for that in place in every app, it's pointless to attempt it on a commercial world-wide OS.

Thank you for pointing out why retaining the emails on government servers is necessary.

If, on the other hand, you are reminding us of this incident in order to excuse it through the "everybody does it" doctrine, kindly go pound sand.