1200262 - Attachment icon not visible until message loaded

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 953315

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Sergio Callegari]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Build ID: 20150826185640

Steps to reproduce:

Working on the Ubuntu linux version of thunderbird, with a gmail mailbox accessed via imap.



Actual results:

Icon indicating attachments is not shown in the message list for messages that have attachments.  Opening a message makes the icon appear for that specific message.

If one "repairs" the folder, then all the icons disappear again.

This looks exactly like bug 241203 that was closed in the past.


Expected results:

Icons indicating attachment should show from the first time for messages that have attachments, without the need to open the messages. Repairing the folder should not make the icons disappear.

Comment 1

[Kent James (:rkent)]

This is a well-known limitation, because we need to read the message and parse it before being able to truly say if attachments exist. Surely there must be an early bug that describes this.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Looks much like Bug 477981.

Otherwise tentative list below:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=%3Athun%2Cmailn%20attach%20icon&list_id=12524610

Comment 3

[Daniel]

Also seeing this bug in 38.4.0, for unsigned IMAP messages. One very annoying effect is that searching for messages with attachments will only find messages that have been opened before.

Comment 4

[Mark Sicignano]

(In reply to Kent James (:rkent) from comment #1)
> This is a well-known limitation, because we need to read the message and
> parse it before being able to truly say if attachments exist. 

When you're scrolling through your email looking for that email that Hillary Clinton send you that has an attachment, and there is no attachment icon, you could miss it. Also, when using the Quick Filter, it let's you filter to messages with attachments, but the mails that haven't been opened and hence, not parsed, will NOT show up.

There are other features that depend on knowing if a mail attachment exists or not. Like mail filters. The "Has Attachment" filter will not do it's job on unparsed emails. I have tested this in 45.2.0, and the filter will not work. Then I will click on a handful of emails that I know have attachments and they show in the message pane, and the attachment paperclip icon now displays. I can re-run the filters and now the "Has Attachments" filter works as expected.

BTW, there are people mentioning IMAP above. I don't think it has anything to do with IMAP. I'm using POP to download my messages and I do not have "Download message headers only." So the whole message should be available when the filters are automatically run on my inbox.

Comment 5

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

If you have Global Search enabled, it should set the attachment icon as soon as it indexes the email (which isn't immediate, but usually happens within a couple seconds).

Comment 6

[Mark Sicignano]

I do have Global Search enabled. Unfortunately it's not fast enough for mail filters to catch the "has attachment" and take action on the emails. 

Being inundated with lots of virus laden emails lately, I wanted to create a filter: From is not in my address book, size of the message is < 40k, **has attachment**, then mark it as junk.

Most of the trojans that are coming in are zipped executables and the messages are usually smaller than 40k.

This would save me a lot of manually marking them as junk, alas the has attachment does not show until the message is typically opened. So the "has attachment" filter is useless on incoming emails.

Comment 7

[Dan Meek]

I have found that filters cannot recognize whether an incoming message has an attachment.  See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224392

Comment 8

[Worcester12345]

Attachment icon still having issues.

Comment 9

[Mikhail Ryazanov]

I also have noticed the opposite problem: the attachment icon sometimes appears in the message list for some previously read messages without any attachments. When such messages are selected and displayed, the wrong icons disappears.

Comment 11

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Bug 953315 seems to be the oldest open unqualified case (without deeper analysis of mime structure, althought WADA may disagree...). So let's dupe some other general cases there.