Thunderbird hangs on send saying "attaching"

[kaz101]

This has been annoying me for ages too.

Following on from another suggestion above I went into Tools -> Options -> Composition and unchecked add extension to file name. So far that has worked for me. The forward message was already set to inline and the auto save is off.

Not sure if it'll work for anyone else but it may be worth a try.

Cheers,
Karen

[YKFILMS]

Try disabling the email virus checker for outgoing messages.

[oneillds]

One solution that worked:

Seems to hang when using HTML or including a picture. Just had an email hanging trying to attached "procedure.gif" even when I could not find that reference in any part of the email.

If you "rewrap" the email note (edit --> re-wrap or Ctrl+R) seems to fix the glitch.

[PeterG_UK]

I have recently found that using the keyboard shortcut CTRL + S when I get the Attaching message fixes things. I use the shortcut and can then send.

Hope this helps other.

[OldManRivuh]

THIS IS ABSOLUTE AND UTTER BS!!!

WHY is this STILL happening and NOT WORKING after SO MANY YEARS???

It's gotten beyond the point of severe asininity.

I think it may be time to dump TBird and get a GOOD e-mail client that actually works.

[OldManRivuh]

Removing the pictures in the Emails below fixed the problem for me

That is NOT the "fix".

THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

[Brogden]

I get this problem when I reply to an email that includes an image in the email as part of the sender's signature. When I press send I get the "attaching" message forever, until I cancel the send. Note that the image is in the body of the email, not an attachment. When I delete the image from the person's signature the email sends OK.

I don't think it matters that the image is part of the signature, the same thing happens occasionally with other messages that have images in them. Sometimes this even happens with a message that I have sent with an embedded image. The person who I sent the email to replies with another question, and when I try to send my reply it hangs with the "attaching" message, even through I embedded the original image, and the first time I sent the email with it in, it went without a problem. Again, deleting the image allows the email to send OK.

I am currently running Thunderbird 17.0.6 on Windows 7 Home Premium with all updates installed, but this problem has been around for years, I'm surprised it has never been fixed.

The question seems to be: Why does Thunderbird try to "attach" an image that I can see plain as day in front of me is already embedded in the email? I can imagine this attempt at attachment would be a problem if Thunderbird is looking to find the image in a folder somewhere, rather then looking in the body of the message.

Is there any way to stop Thunderbird trying to attach images that are (already) embedded?

[OldManRivuh]

No. That is (part of) the problem.

It's not rocket science or brain surgery.

It seems like it would be a very 'simple' concept and 'easy' to program, and debug.

The fact that it has been around and a severe and debilitating issue for so many years
is an extreme embarrassment and black eye for the development team.

If this was my program or project, I would probably feel actual shame about it and
be apologizing to everyone all over myself and it would be corrected IMMEDIATELY.

If people worked like this on my project, they would be fired so fast they'd be dizzy.
It doesn't matter that it is volunteer.

Either you have pride in your work product and act professional, or you don't,
regardless of the circumstances. (and ideally you actually know what you're doing)

I've worked on MANY volunteer projects of all kinds and this !@#$%^&* would NOT be allowed.

[Brogden]

Hmmm, yes I agree that it has been around for far too long, many years it seems.

Do we know if the Thunderbird team are aware of this bug, and whether they are working on it? If not, we need to find out how to bring it to their attention.

[c_breeze]

I had this issue when replying to an email. I noticed there was content in the sender's signature in the original email that looked like it was broken image/html content. I deleted that part of their signature and then hit send and it worked just fine.

[OldManRivuh]

I had this issue when replying to an email. I noticed there was content in the sender's signature in the original email that looked like it was broken image/html content. I deleted that part of their signature and then hit send and it worked just fine.

That is the problem we're talking about. ANY image content, usually anywhere, causes it to fail.
Including image content in your own signature.
Deleting it is the work around.
We want it fixed, once and for all.

[Erirenort]

Hi forum,

I use the German version of TB 17.0.6 (Win8 Pro), and for some versions now I also encountered this misbehaviour of TB while composing / sending emails. As OldManRivuh correctly says, it is not an option just to delete inline images which could be inserted by replying to a previos email, although I was that desperate that I did it in my case.

Desperation culminated when I had to learn that TB 17 still refused to save or send the email after the deletion. When I thereupon examined the mailbody (for this I have installed EditHtml, https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/edithtml-en.html), I discovered two links with the attribute "moz-do-not-send" set to "true", which where remainders of the email I tried to reply to. For example:

<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://webaddress.tld">Linktext</a>

When I deleted the moz-do-not-send="true"-Part and left the rest of the email unchanged, saving and sending was a matter of a second.

Of course this is a single-case-observation and might not work in other cases. But I just wanted to contribute this info in case it helps someone else out of trouble. Still I would be interested to learn which TB-mechanism stumbles on these moz-do-not-send-attributes (and hopefully how to tame it in order not to have to manually fix the mailbody of my email replies any more).

Have a nice day,
Thomas

[Brogden]

Hi forum,

I use the German version of TB 17.0.6 (Win8 Pro), and for some versions now I also encountered this misbehaviour of TB while composing / sending emails. As OldManRivuh correctly says, it is not an option just to delete inline images which could be inserted by replying to a previos email, although I was that desperate that I did it in my case.

Desperation culminated when I had to learn that TB 17 still refused to save or send the email after the deletion. When I thereupon examined the mailbody (for this I have installed EditHtml, https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/edithtml-en.html), I discovered two links with the attribute "moz-do-not-send" set to "true", which where remainders of the email I tried to reply to. For example:

<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://webaddress.tld">Linktext</a>

When I deleted the moz-do-not-send="true"-Part and left the rest of the email unchanged, saving and sending was a matter of a second.

Of course this is a single-case-observation and might not work in other cases. But I just wanted to contribute this info in case it helps someone else out of trouble. Still I would be interested to learn which TB-mechanism stumbles on these moz-do-not-send-attributes (and hopefully how to tame it in order not to have to manually fix the mailbody of my email replies any more).

Have a nice day,
Thomas

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for a very interesting post, you certainly seem to have got closer to the source of the problem.

I totally agree that having to work around this problem by deleting parts of messages is not satisfactory, and it is almost unbelievable that this problem persists after all this time.

Is there any way to get the developers to respond to this problem?

Kind regards - Brogden

[SiO2]

Hello Forum,
I'm using the Italian version of TB for two years now and I'm experiencing this problem from some versions now. I'm currently running TB 17.0.6 over OpenSUSE 12.2 but same problem did occur also on Ubuntu.
It seems that - in my case - the attaching problem happens when the composition of the message lasts longer than a few minutes, no matter what content: with or without images, with or without attachments... TB hangs on "creazione allegato" that is "attaching" in English - I suppose after attempting to autosave - and the only way out for me is to close the message without sending/saving and compose it again. Sending of this second message exactly identical to the previous one always works perfectly...
I'm sure the two messages are identical since before to close the first one I copy to the clipboard the text I've added to the email to which I'm replying, then I close the message without saving, I start a new reply to the same email and paste the text from the clipboard.
Following a suggestion found here I've now tried to disable the autosave option, I'll let you know if it works...

[Brogden]

From viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2717789&p=12913373#p12913373

This has been a bug for a couple of years now, unfortunately only with some but not all instances identified. It's tracked by bug 532395 and some other bugs.

The main reason for this to happen is that the reference to the image changes while you are composing the message which contains it ... e.g., you start the reply to a message and then the folder is compacted.

It's very frustrating. I have found the same as you, in trying to duplicate the behaviour by creating an identical reply, it doesn't happen.

It seems there is no one working on this well-known bug at the moment. I think that it's a serious enough bug that it should be fixed, but apparently the "developer community" doesn't agree.