text attachments

icehawk · Post by **icehawk** » February 11th, 2004, 1:15 pm

i send e-mails that i attach a text document to and in some cases multiple text documents. the receipient has notified me that the attached text document(s) are not attached to the e-mail but are inserted inline to the e-mail. does anyone know if there is a setting that will leave text attachements as attachments and not place them in the e-mail. i have looked everywhere with no luck. i'm sure its staring me straight in the face. thanks, stan.

Post by **tanstaafl** » February 11th, 2004, 5:36 pm

I couldn't find a setting for it either.

I sent myself a file attachment using thunderbird 0.5. The mail summary shows there is an attachment. If I open the message the attachments field at the bottom of the screen has a filename that I have to click on to view the attached file. However, the message headers state "Content-Disposition: inline;" . Since it takes explicit action from me to see the attachment, I would have expected "Content-Disposition: attachment;".

As a sanity check I sent the same message/attachment to yahoo. When I read the message there it displays it inline, and shows no sign of an attachment. This sounds like what your recipient is experiencing. This seems to violate RFC 2183.

I searched bugzilla and found

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65794
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229075

One of them says its not a bug because "the [filename] parameter may be used on any MIME entity, even `inline'. Thunderbird did use a filename parameter. i.e. technically legal even though it causes a problem.

The other one suggests using the user preference mail.content_disposition_type' . I added
user_pref("mail.content_disposition_type", 1); to my prefs.js in my thunderbird profile.

I did that and sent another test message to both yahoo and fastmail (both have webmail). It looks/acts the same in thunderbird, but the header is now "Content-Disposition: attachment;". Yahoo still displays the attachment inline. Fastmail displays it correctly. I see the message body, but have to click on the attachment icon to see the file attachment.

So, it would appear you can workaround this problem using user_pref("mail.content_disposition_type", 1);

icehawk · Post by **icehawk** » February 12th, 2004, 6:32 pm

the issue isn't for me so much as it is for the recipient who is using ms outlook. they need to be able to save the text file and if i send more then one text file they become one big inline message. the e-mail ends up the same way in my sent folder. what a pain. had the same issue with netscape.

Post by **tanstaafl** » February 12th, 2004, 7:07 pm

I understand that. Since Mozilla, Netscape Composer and Thunderbird share most of their mail code I would expect Netscape to cause the same problem.

The reason why I sent email to myself at two different webmail accounts was to try to emulate the problem your recipient has. It worked, I saw the same problems your recipient did.

I found adding the user preference to thunderbird solved the problem for one webmail client, but not the other. However, since it did change the MIME header from a unusual value that was quaranteed by definition to always cause the problem to the standard expected value, the fact it didn't work for yahoo might be a problem with yahoo. I only had a sample size of two

Did you try adding the user preference and see if that solved the recipients problem?

JeffC · Post by **JeffC** » February 13th, 2004, 11:43 am

tanstaafl wrote:Did you try adding the user preference and see if that solved the recipients problem?

I was having the same problem (sending text attachments to Outlook Express) and adding the preference line solved it for me (with regard to Outlook Express recipients). I can confirm it still shows up inline for Yahoo webmail recipients.

Thanks for the workaround! I hope this annoying bug is squashed soon, because it was almost a show-stopper for me. Another "workaround," of course, is to just zip up the text files before sending them. Kind of a PITA, though.

It would also be nice if TB would add a preference to choose what attachment types to display inline for received emails. (Currently "view attachments inline" applies to both images and text files ... I suppose some people out there might have some reason for wanting to view text files inline, but it's quite beyond my comprehension.)