102960 - save multiple messages as single file

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, enhancement)

Description

[Scott Kester]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4+) Gecko/20011002
BuildID:    2001100221

This works for me under NS 4.x but has never worked under Mozilla.  Go to a news
group and select multiple messages (click one, then shift click to highlight
more than one).  Now go to File->Save As->File.  No dialog pops up to enter a
file name, and nothing is saved.  Ctrl+S does not work either.

I need this function to save UUencoded binary files into one file, that I can
then decode. (Better yet Mozilla should have a combine and decode function that
does this for me :-))

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Highlight several news messages in the message pane
2.Now try File->Save As->File
3.Nothing happens.

Actual Results:  Nothing happens

Expected Results:  Should let me save all the selected messages into one file.

Comment 1

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 60981 ***

Comment 2

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Arrgh.  So this isn't an outright DUP, although bug 60981 would make you very 
happy indeed.  Re-opening.  (Sorry).

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

4.x on linux makes the File | Save As menu item selectable when multiple
postings are selected.  I'm getting errors -  "You are not allowed to choose a
directory" when trying to actually save them to as a file...  I'll see what
Win32 does...

Comment 4

[Scott Kester]

Stephen,

With Netscape 4.X on linux, after you select Save As -> File, you must enter a
filename because there is no default file name listed in the file dialog, just a
directory like /home/stephen.  Make that /home/stephen/test.dat.  That is why
you are getting the cannot save as directory error.  I just tried and verified
this behavior on 4.76.

Comment 5

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Scott, yes indeed.  Thanks for the clarification.

Comment 6

[Peter Bartecki]

Bug 58140 covers this request for Mail or at least the same NN4.x feature was
described. I'm not sure if News backend is diferent from Mail one.

Comment 7

[gsanft]

I just checked in my Linux/mozilla 1.1b that I have on hand.  I really want to
chime in on this one.  It's an aggrevating sucky bug.  Maybe it's just because I
don't get around very much, meaning basically that I haven't used Windows for
any meaningful length of time since 3.1, but what the *hell* is an .eml message
and what could possibly be interested in the apparent raw RFC822 format except
sendmail & friends?  

I've only ever checked this before using local messages (as for bug #58140, and
I'm heading there in a few minutes).  Everything seems the same in news, except
to pile insult on top of injury, the "message.eml" file is being written with
mode 0700.  There's no reason to be saving it with execute permission as well as
in no useful format.

Here are my specific suggestions:

 - Drop the option of even saving a whatever-the-hell-it's-supposed-to-be .eml
format and include a proper "From " line at the top of the output.

 - If you even continue to offer .html and .txt formats, make them useful in
some measure, the present formats seem only an exercise in doing *something*
with the content.  And (if you continue to offer the formats) make it so
selecting the file type with the dialog automatically changes the extension and
saved file type.  The dialog currently seems to be only an exercise in drawing a
dropdown selection box.  It does nothing.

 - If you even suggest any filename at all (I opt for none) then don't use
"message", but rather the subject line, or newsgroup name, or something halfway
meaningful and useful.  As it presently stands, the filename requires being
selected and overwritten with something anyway.

 - Since you should already be adding a proper "From " line at the top of the
raw output, saving multiple messages would result in proper mbox format
message.  Wouldn't that be useful?  YES!

 - Oh, enable saving mutliple messages.

 - Maybe offer to overwrite a preexisting file as a secondary option, but have
the primary action be to append the proper mbox format message to the existing
file.  Again, the purpose being to create useful output.

The current setup is really utterly useless.  Please, please try again.  You had
a perfectly good example in the 4.x series; the results here need not deviate in
any respect from it.

Comment 8

[Robert Mohr]

This is not related to bug 58140 in the way specified in comment 6.  58140 is
about saving multiple messages to multiple files in a single folder, with a
default filename applied to them all.

This and 58140 should both cover mail and news.

Comment 9

[Robert Mohr]

I'm assuming that whether or not the backend for mail and news are the same that
this should be fixed for both.

Updating fields.  Sorry for bugspam.

Comment 10

[Alfonso Martinez]

*** Bug 238784 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Alfonso Martinez]

*** Bug 238784 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[David :Bienvenu]

*** Bug 241294 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Kevin Donaker-Ring]

This is the bug I thought I was commenting on when I found and commented on bug
58140. This is the behavior of 4.x Save As (select multiple messages, choose
Save As from menu, all messages saved to single file) that I was requesting be
restored to Mozilla when I made comments on and voted for Bug 58140. Had I known
this was not what was originally reported, I would have filed a separate bug
YEARS AND YEARS AGO!!!!

Comment 14

[OstGote!]

*** Bug 317288 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Arkady Belousov]

*** Bug 339597 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Geert Poels]

*** Bug 339604 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 17

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 19

[Geert Poels]

Why can't we still not save multiple messages into a single file ?
This bug has been open for six years. Six !
One message, save-as. Works.
Multiple identical messages, save-as. Nope.
Incredible ... :(((((((((((((((((

Comment 21

[Lucius Chiaraviglio]

Something did change for the slightly better in some recent version of Thunderbird (not sure exactly which one), although I would call it only a step in the right direction rather than a fix.  Now at least you can select multiple messages and use Save As... on them (until fairly recently, this was greyed out).  The remaining (big) problem is that this only lets you dump the messages into a folder as separate *.eml files, with no option to convert to HTML or Text, and no way to combine them or choose the file name(s) (and of course no way to append to an existing file, for instance one created by doing this operation previously -- see Bug 134526).

Comment 22

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Yes that was fixed in bug 58140.