missing attachment in TB 8.0

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VonDerTann
Guest

missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by VonDerTann »

Yesterday, after upgrading to TB 8.0, I've received an email, where the sender wrote:

"see attachment"

There was no attachment: on another PC with TB 7.01, the same email shows the attachment....

In our company we have around 15 PCs with Thunderbird, checking the same email, thata attachment was visible on TB 7.01 only.

Any suggestion ?

Thanks in advance
Guest
Guest

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by Guest »

I get the same thing with certain attachments. The one I am having problems with is a .DAT attachment. All other attachments show up. I had to uninstall version 8 and go back to version 3.1.15
Big dipper
Guest

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by Big dipper »

Same problem here: attachments do not show up. Back to TB 7.
VonDerTann
Guest

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by VonDerTann »

Well, in my case the attachments was a xls file, and the email was sended with exchange;

X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5

naturally I can't live with such a problem, and so I've switched back to TB 7.01, I hope thi s problem will be fixed soon....
orictosh
Guest

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by orictosh »

VonDerTann wrote:Well, in my case the attachments was a xls file, and the email was sended with exchange;

X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5

naturally I can't live with such a problem, and so I've switched back to TB 7.01, I hope thi s problem will be fixed soon....


I also have this problem, the attachment is lost (icon disappears) when you select the email, you can also see the file-name within the source of the email, so Where is the file?
I asked the user to re-send the email, which was forwarded and the attachment was fine.
Is it something that exchange is doing to the file or is it sending a link to the document stored at sender's end which then being removed which then breaks the link.
My reason for this thinking is that on the first email the message body was blank and on the second (which was ok) the body had the senders signature file within it. What method is being used with Office Excel to send email? Rather than using Outlook directly which sends the email with attachment and opens with no problems.
orictosh
Posts: 5
Joined: November 14th, 2011, 12:51 pm
Location: UK

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by orictosh »

Hi,
An Update on this problem, following a install of the extension Show All Body Parts 1.1 into TB 8.0
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunde ... ts/?src=ss My client has been able to view attachments and no longer loses the paper clip when clicking the email and all the attachments that he believed he had lost, returned.

Will this problem be fixed in the updates which will take TB 8 to TB 9 or is the extension the official fix for this problem?

Thanks to the developer jikamens for this extension.
https://addons.mozilla.org/z/en-US/thun ... developers
jikamens
Guest

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by jikamens »

orictosh wrote:Hi,
An Update on this problem, following a install of the extension Show All Body Parts 1.1 into TB 8.0
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunde ... ts/?src=ss My client has been able to view attachments and no longer loses the paper clip when clicking the email and all the attachments that he believed he had lost, returned.


Note that you should use version 1.2 or later of Show All Body Parts. There's a bug in 1.1 which makes the menu item fail to show up sometimes. It's fixed in 1.2 but it isn't fully reviewed yet so that's not the default version you get from the add-on page. You can, however, download it from the versions page.

orictosh wrote:Will this problem be fixed in the updates which will take TB 8 to TB 9 or is the extension the official fix for this problem?


Discussions are underway for the best way to fix the issue, but it's a complicated problem which will probably require a significant amount of work to fix. The add-on is a temporary workaround, but it's one that's probably going to be necessary for a while.
orictosh
Posts: 5
Joined: November 14th, 2011, 12:51 pm
Location: UK

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by orictosh »

Ahh, yes I remember my client saying it had not shown on the first attempt to install so I asked him to remove it, restart TB then just install it again which worked fine. I will pass the information to my client about the new version and that it's a temp workaround.
Lufferov
Posts: 18
Joined: September 13th, 2008, 7:04 am

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by Lufferov »

jikamens wrote:Discussions are underway for the best way to fix the issue, but it's a complicated problem which will probably require a significant amount of work to fix. The add-on is a temporary workaround, but it's one that's probably going to be necessary for a while.


Why is it a complicated problem? You just list all attachments in the attacments panel. Simple surely?
orictosh
Posts: 5
Joined: November 14th, 2011, 12:51 pm
Location: UK

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by orictosh »

It's sounds simple but it's not
The email coming from exchange 2003 (v6.5) is sending email attachments malformed as the paper clip in TB 8.0 is removed when you click the email to view and you are unable to view it so, to the user they believe it's lost, but it's hidden within the email. Also depends on the type of file sent as the one affected in the above case was .xls MS Excel and another attachments PDF, JPG..etc where fine. Original user sent the email to my client (he was not able to view the attachment) but he forwarded it to me (I could see the attachment) I then returned it to him and he was able to see the attachment.

Maybe Microsoft have fixed the malformed email attachment handing in a later version of exchange sever so in order to fix this problem do you
1) force everyone using Exchange Server 2003 to upgrade a newer or
2) enable TB 8.0 to deal with this bug and malformed email attachments rather than not showing them.

Also the problem could lie within MS Office versions in which the user is sending the email from within the application i.e using the send file by email option. An excepted way to send email only if the email is formed correctly which is this case it's not, but you are again asking the sender to upgrade their office application to apply (if any) bug fixes so the receiver (using TB 8.0) can view the attachment with no problems.
Lufferov
Posts: 18
Joined: September 13th, 2008, 7:04 am

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by Lufferov »

Well you obviously enable TB 8 to deal with it! Otherwise people don't get the attachments, when the bug is fixed then you can remove the handling. It worked on previous releases so the code was obviously there before. What was the reasoning behind its removal?
rsx11m
Moderator
Posts: 14404
Joined: May 3rd, 2007, 7:40 am
Location: US

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by rsx11m »

Well, nothing is intentional about it, as far as I know. It's the side effect of another fix dealing with detaching attachments.

Just to be clear about it: Microsoft sends junk which is not in compliance with the applicable IETF standards, thus no e-mail client is obligated in any way to handle such malformed messages. The user of course sees it differently and would like to get to the attachment regardless of how well it is hidden in the message and thus "officially" inaccessible.

The "Show All Parts" function is indeed a workaround as it is overdoing it by showing all alternative (plain-text and HTML) message parts along with all related inlined and otherwise somehow included content. So, that's the other extreme and not really a permanent solution. It does well for me in 8.0, so that's in essence covered for the time being.

For a comprehensive solution there is bug 674473 with a related newsgroup discussion, so the task here is to come up with a set of rules by which attachments in an incorrect context can be detected and made available in the attachment pane. Personally I've come up with three major rules but it may be more complex than that.
rsx11m
Moderator
Posts: 14404
Joined: May 3rd, 2007, 7:40 am
Location: US

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by rsx11m »

A new bug report was confirmed acknowledging a regression in TB 8.0 on omitting attachments with a certain encoding of the attachment name. Thus, if you saw the attachment in 5.0-7.0.1 but not in 8.0 and you don't have an add-on installed which may have been deactivated for compatibility reasons and the attachment file name contains non-ASCII characters (e.g., containing diacritics or a non-latin alphabet), this may be bug 702938, a regression introduced by a recent fix related to the "Show All Parts" feature.

The one I am having problems with is a .DAT attachment. All other attachments show up.

Talking of disabled add-ons, if that's a "winmail.dat" file you have a different problem. You may have had the LookOut extension installed to handle Microsoft-TNEF attachments, and it possibly got deactivated during the Thunderbird update and thus requires to be updated.
exg001001
Guest

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by exg001001 »

Eventually they will come up with a solution I'm sure. But using the "show all body parts" does have issues for some of my users at least. It breaks apart HTML formed emails that some users are use to view as is, versus actually clicking a link to go to the site. Not a huge deal, but still.

Here is my specific problem: if someone sends me an email by attaching a file to an email from their mail client, it comes through fine. If they send me an email from the software (for instance, Adobe Reader->Send Email or Word->Send Email As Attachment), it does not show the attachment on Thunderbird.

Also, I don't know if anyone else noticed, but if you click forward on the email with the hidden attachment, the attachment is right there to view or send. :shock:

Strange one.

Ed
rsx11m
Moderator
Posts: 14404
Joined: May 3rd, 2007, 7:40 am
Location: US

Re: missing attachment in TB 8.0

Post by rsx11m »

If the attachment is the only part in the message (i.e., no multipart construct) it was omitted in the attachment list as well. That's fixed with bug 701261 and should work again in Thunderbird 9.0, due next week or so.

However, attachments sent by MAPI on Windows should still have a plain-text part with some default text. One of the examples shown in the report has a single MS-Excel part created with some Exchange server, thus maybe there are ways to create such messages, but it should be hard to do so with Thunderbird itself.
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