Attached text files don't show up as attachments

[treyz3]

I sent an email with an attached tab-delimited text file so that someone else could use it to import into a database. However, when they get the message, they don't see it as an attachment, it just shows up as part of the email and not as an attachment. If I send it to myself, TB sees it as an attachment, but in Eudora it's not.

Is there a configuration change I can make to solve this? Or is this a feature?

TIA.

[atangel]

Sounds more like an issue with the other person's client.... for example, choosing to see attachments as inline or not when you are viewing them in TB (view menu)

[danm]

When creating a message, by default Thunderbird treats text attachments as a part of the message body. To force it to encode all attachments as actual separate attachments set the pref

Code: Select all

user_pref("mail.content_disposition_type", 1);

This simply makes Tbird always use the

Content-Disposition: attachment;

descriptor in the attachment's header rather than intelligently (or stupidly depending on your point of view) use the default

Content-Disposition: inline;

for inlineable things like text files.

I'm pretty sure that's the descriptor Eudora wants to see to treat it as a separate attachment.

I agree this is an unlovely interface. Personally I'd see this as a checkbox on individual mail messages. There was a big discussion about this on this forum some time back that I can't find right now.

Alternatively you could always just zip the text file.

[treyz3]

That did the trick.

I'd agree that it would be great if this was an option when sending the mail.

And sending zip files only works when the person you're sending them to has a clue.

[thunderkiwi]

Hi,

That seems like it would be the fix to my problem too, but I'm a newbie and I don't know which file to make the changes to, can you help? I don't have a user.js file.

Thanks,

Matt

[flaxthejute]

Hi,

That seems like it would be the fix to my problem too, but I'm a newbie and I don't know which file to make the changes to, can you help? I don't have a user.js file.

Thanks,

Matt

Install the chromeedit extension. This makes editing the user file easy.

Flax

[danm]

That's probably good advice for a newbie. Personally I like to keep my installed extensions to a minimum, though. If you feel the same, see http://www.holgermetzger.de/einstallation.html#1 but remember we're talking about adding user.js to your Thunderbird profile, not your Mozilla profile. So replace "Mozilla" by "Thunderbird" in the file system path given in the instructions for locating your profile.

It's a lot more complicated than punching a button in a prefs dialog, but there's no prefs dialog button for this feature.

[thunderkiwi]

Well that's fixed it! Thanks very much for your help. I went the adding a file route, couldn't have been any easier.

Thanks again.

Matt

[richyrambo]

Having a similar problem using TB 0.8 in which my .txt attachments display in the body of the email message at the bottom.

Installed chromeedit extension and altered my user.js file to include:

// This should change attached image and text files from inline to attachment.
user_pref("mail.content_disposition_type", 1);

Unfortunately .txt files still appear at the bottom of the email.

Doing a Ctrl-U on the email messages shows:

Content-Type: text/plain;
name="Hedgehog_Hell.txt"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="Hedgehog_Hell.txt"

Any thoughts on making this stay an attachment and NOT appear in the email.

[mcleaver]

This is all pretty silly... if all my contacts see my text files as message and not files, then there is something wrong with Thunderbird. Please fix.
I really have no idea about editing user.js files wherever they may be

[danm]

richyrambo: I don't know of any setting to force Thunderbird to not display text attachments, even if they really are attachments, appended to the bottom of the message. Other mail clients will behave differently, as we've already determined.

mcleaver: I agree, as we've already discussed, this seems like an omission from Thunderbird's user interface. Why not file an enhancement request?