Thunderbird and Attachments

[Guerri Stevens]

I am using the Thunderbird Email software. Sometimes I get messages that have attachments which I cannot read. One message I looked at just now had one of those. It is an old message, stored in one of my folders. Down in the attachment box is an attachment with the extension .eml. I *think* that some of these work, but not all.

This particular message has a subject that begins "Fwd: FW:" which makes me think the message was forwarded to the person who sent it to me, and that she forwarded it on to me. I don't know whether that is significant.

If I double click the attachment, a new Tbird window opens, and there is a little bit of text and some small boxes which I believe should be pictures.

I have Tbird set to not download messages larger than 500K (it gives me the option to download the rest). I also block loading of remote images and it notifies me of that too. And I have blocked javascript in Email.

One recent message was sent to my husband as well as to me, and he, using Outlook, was able to open the attachment without any problem.

I notice that Tbird doesn't display anything next to a message to indicate that it has an attachment.

I have been told that it is possible to embed things directly in Email messages - like a photograph in the body of the message, somehow, rather than as an attachment. Possibly that is what was done with the messages I can't open properly.


Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong?

[Guerri Stevens]

P.S. I fooled around with this after posting my original message. First I changed my View to Original HTML which didn't do anything different. Then I tried "display attachments inline" and that worked, showing me the images.

I guess I will just use that option from now on when double clicking the attachment doesn't work.

[jdh]

I'm not using T-Bird now. But I remember having set it in the past to download only 50KB of a message, I think. IIRC, if a message was bigger it would download the start but not the rest.

Normally attachments (even binary images) are just more text appended onto the text of a message. So if you use the feature of the email program that lets you "view source", then you can see what part of a message has been chopped off , if any.

Perhaps you may remember how COMPUSERVE used to break attachments out of email messages received by TAPCIS and CIS software and make each attachment into a single separate message. Regular POP3 email such as what you are receiving into T-Bird would NOT break the message into its parts (attachments). If the attachments were too big or too many it's possible that the whole msg. could exceed the download limit you had set (e.g. 500KB). If the first 500KB of a msg. were downloaded and the rest missing then something certainly would appear out of order, sooner or later.

DH

[jdh]

By the way, some web mail systems such as Google would let you read mail in a browser on the web AND with a regular POP3 (or IMAP) email program such as T-Bird. So if a partial message was in your T-bird folder and it did not display attachments properly, you could still check out the original big message on the web (or download the rest of the message into T-bird). Google gives you almost 3 GB email space so you could probably let the junk accumulate for years before having to weed it out :)

Unless people are sending multimedia clips to you by email all the time.

DH

[Guerri Stevens]

By the way, some web mail systems such as Google would let you read mail in a browser on the web AND with a regular POP3 (or IMAP) email program such as T-Bird. So if a partial message was in your T-bird folder and it did not display attachments properly, you could still check out the original big message on the web (or download the rest of the message into T-bird). Google gives you almost 3 GB email space so you could probably let the junk accumulate for years before having to weed it out :)DH
For messages larger than my specified limit, Tbird will download part, then give me a message that says it chopped the message off, and an option to download the rest. I don't think the message length is causing the problem I'm having.

I have a tapcis.com Email address, so yes, I can go directly there with my browser to read mail. However, unless I am on the road, I read mail with Tbird, and I've set it up to delete messages from the server as it reads them. So by the time I know I can't properly look at the messages, it's too late to read them elsewhere.

At least now I know that I can use "view attachments inline" to look at the problem messages. I am still wondering why some work and some don't, particularly if, as I think, some with the .eml extension work and others don't. I could ask the senders, but mostly they are not knowledgeable about this stuff and I'd probably just confuse them.

[Peter Creasey]

I tried "display attachments inline" and that worked, showing me the images.
I guess I will just use that option from now on when double clicking the attachment doesn't work.

Guerri, Yes, that is the way I have SeaMonkey set up also.

[jdh]

However, unless I am on the road, I read mail with Tbird, and I've set it up to delete messages from the server as it reads them. So by the time I know I can't properly look at the messages, it's too late to read them elsewhere.


FYI, FWIW, Google mail can be configured so that when you read a message by POP3 (e.g. with Tbird), the message then goes to archive or to trash. You can still read it in the trash for up to 30 days.

Google can also be configured to read multiple other POP3 email accounts (like some other web mail programs do) or to forward messages to another email account or BOTH.

For example, one probably could configure Gmail to POP mail from a TAPICS pop3 account into a Gmail account (but still leaving msgs with unread status in TAPCIS for later POP by Tbird) and then make a filter in Gmail that would automatically put all mail into the trash (haven't tried this), to give one a 30 day backup, if one did not want to keep the messages. Otherwise one could archive up to 2.8GB of mail POP'd from other accounts onto Gmail.

DavidH

P.S.
".eml" might be a proprietary message format. e.g. IIRC MS Outlook Express may or may have used that file extension either now or in the past versions of that program. If that is the case, Tbird may not support display of such proprietary format?

[Peter Creasey]

FYI, FWIW, Google mail can be configured so that when you read a message by POP3 (e.g. with Tbird), the message then goes to archive or to trash. You can still read it in the trash for up to 30 days.

David, Or you can just have Thunderbird delete the message whenever you delete it from Thunderbird.

[jdh]

David, Or you can just have Thunderbird delete the message whenever you delete it from Thunderbird.

That definitely would be easier to set up when one already has Tbird running.

DH