Thunderbird corrupting incoming attachments.

rhkarma · Post by **rhkarma** » February 14th, 2008, 2:17 pm

Hi everyone,

At the University I work at we have three clients having issues with Thunderbird corrupting email attachments. These accounts are set up as IMAP on OSX 4.11 and one on 10.5.2 with SSL enabled on both incoming and outgoing mail servers. The attachments come through fine when we use our standard webmail based login, or when set up the same imap accounts in Applemail. We tried removing the profiles, and reinstalling Thunderbird. We tried both the latest build of Thunderbird, as well as the now unsupported 1.5 version. We also tried repairing permissions with disk utility. Type of documents vary from PNG and JPG files to XLS and DOC from office 2004 for mac. If anyone has some insight as to what could be going on here that would be great. We have many other Thunderbird users without this problem.

makaiguy · Post by **makaiguy** » February 14th, 2008, 3:02 pm

Are these messages sent by people using Microsoft Outlook as their email client?

See if this article helps: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Winmail.dat_attachments

rhkarma · Post by **rhkarma** » February 14th, 2008, 3:30 pm

makaiguy wrote:Are these messages sent by people using Microsoft Outlook as their email client?

See if this article helps: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Winmail.dat_attachments

No, one is another Thunderbird user, two are Eudora users (using Mime), and one is an Apple "mail" user.

rhkarma · Post by **rhkarma** » February 14th, 2008, 3:34 pm

I was just able to confirm that they are not from TNEF. Thank you for the suggestion though.

Egidio · Post by **Egidio** » February 14th, 2008, 4:12 pm

rhkarma,

The settings those people are using when they email the attachments could be the problem. I've had the exact same situation at various times. Then when I log on to my web mail, I see that the attachments are actually coming as two parts. Thunderbird can only see one. I recall that in Eudora, if the user sets attachments to be sent as Apple Double, TBird will not get the attachment correctly. Are you able to look at a message on the web and see if there are indeed two parts to the attachment or just one part?

Also, at one point, I did have a problem with my profile in TBird. It somehow got damaged because of a bad extension. After trying many different alternatives, I finally solved the problem by creating a new profile.

bkennelly · Post by **bkennelly** » February 14th, 2008, 7:01 pm

If the server reports the wrong size, Thunderbird may truncate the attachments. Exchange and Gmail are know to cause this problem.

Go to the Config Editor, and enter chunks in the filter box. Toggle mail.server.default.fetch_by_chunks to false. That will make Thunderbird ignore the incorrect information.