Partial Attachments Problem

[iaindb]

I'm finding that image attachments from my IMAP account are only being partially downloaded. If I save an attachment or forward an email with an attachment, then only about 10% of the image is shown, and the rest is corrupt.

I tried saving the attachment a number of times, and I viewed it with various viewers (gimp, gqview, eog).

I forward an email as-is to a windows user with outlook, and it is only partially included.

I viewed the source, and the encoded image data just seems to "end".

If I use evolution, my mobile, or webmail to access the account, the attachment is there in full.

The only thing I could find on the www was this post from 4 years ago: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=69931&p=5487565#p5487565

I'm using Thunderbird 3.0b1 on Linux 2.6.26.

Thanks.

[rth123]

I've had the same problem and it seems to happen when I click on the email with the attached picture (or other files) and it starts downloading if I click on another email it will stop downloading the first and start downloading the next. Then when I click on the first again it only has the partial attachment and will not finish or re-download the attachment(s).

One thing I have found as a work around is to move the message to another subscribed folder and then move it back. This will force TB to re-download the original message and have the full attachment content.

I seem to have less problems after installing the "Sync on Arrival" addon

NOTE: since there is not an official release of the addon for TB 2.x+, you will have to modify the install file before it will work (see viewtopic.php?f=19&t=334530&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=12)

[Mr. C.]

Ditto.

[iaindb]

Good to see it's not just me! I had to go to evolution (shock horror!!) to get the attachments which was a real pain...

[rsx11m]

Could you get an IMAP log for cases where this happens to verify that the correct requests and responses are going forth and back between the server and Thunderbird? There have been cases where IMAP servers report the wrong size, in which case downloading the respective parts is incomplete.

[rth123]

This happens every time without fail for me when I click on a different email while the one with the attachment is still downloading. In my office there is another user connected to the same IMAP with Outlook Express and he always gets the full attachments.

[rsx11m]

If you are going to a message in the same IMAP folder, it should stall until the download of the attachment is completed. Only one connection to the IMAP server is opened for a folder, thus you cannot have two simultaneous actions on the same folder (see bug 432143).

Anybody here using offline storage/syncing?

[rsx11m]

This happens every time without fail for me when I click on a different email while the one with the attachment is still downloading.

Ok, this is somewhat tricky to reproduce (managed that rather by chance), but I've sent myself a message with five large attachments and saved them from the IMAP Inbox onto the Desktop (using Save All). While this is active, I've switched to a different message in the same folder.

With syncing/offline storage activated, the new message appeared immediately (I think it was synced at that time), the first four attachments were intact, the fifth however truncated. It stayed that way on repeated save attempts, thus I assume that the message was in the process of being synced to offline storage when it was interrupted, thus the message incomplete but not reloaded when visited again.

I had no such problems using IMAP without syncing, I clicked on a different message while the first attachment was downloaded, but the display stayed on the current message and only after the third (and before the fourth) attachment was downloaded switched to the new selection. Attachments four and five were downloaded and saved completely.

This may be some combination of bugs #405437, #425723, and or #433615 with its dependencies. If you have some steps to consistently reproduce this, please go ahead and file a bug report, then post its bug number here.

[jedonnelley]

I've seen an instance where it was a message that was partial - not "just" an attachment.

I was able to get Thunderbird to pull over the whole message by clearing it's IMAP
cache.

I consider this a very serious problem because I sometimes don't check full
messages before pulling them into a local folder. Once the message is removed
from the IMAP server I'll only have what's in the local folder which may be
partial.

I'd like to get a version of Thunderbird with IMAP partial transfers commented
out to avoid this problem. This seems like a seriously mistaken over
optimization to me.