1376187 - allow to change the behaviour of drag and drop for emails : save the content without attachments

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[Jérôme Bouat]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0
Build ID: 20170612122443

Steps to reproduce:

I saved the attachement as separate files and finally drag and drop my email into the file explorer window.


Actual results:

The whole content of my email (with attachement) was appareared as an email file into my file explorer window. This big file is a kind of duplicate besides the attachment which are already saved here.


Expected results:

I would like on option which would change the behaviour of the drag and drop : just save the content of the email without its attachements. An other enhancement would propose to save this content as pdf instead of email file.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

We have very limited resources, especially for enhancements like this one. Since we're volunteer-based, some volunteer would have to present a patch.

It's easy enough to print an e-mail to PDF.

Comment 2

[Jérôme Bouat]

Ok, I understand you prioritize.
I would like to share a complement. 11 persons are working into my organisation. We are sharing ~770MB of ".eml" files and most of theses files have saved attachement as duplicates. Let's say there is ~700MB of duplicates which are backuped 26 times (daily, weekly, monthly). Finally it makes ~18GB of duplicates. This amount of backup isn't only the cost of the tapes but also the working time of the person who checks the backup, etc.
In our case, this enhancement would lower the total cost ownership of Thunderbird.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Then you should hire someone to submit a patch. Thunderbird is purely volunteer-maintained (apart from a few staff who look after infrastructure issues and releases), so you'd have to convince a volunteer that this is a good feature to have.

Besides, why should a volunteer-based operation implement something so you can do your *business* better. Or is the organisation you're talking about a charity or NGO?

Besides, what's wrong with saving the e-mail as PDF?

Or some other suggestion: Write a script that examines the saved .eml file and strips any attachments. That's about, maybe, four hours work. You look for Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===========", take the boundary, then strip everything after the second occurrence of the boundary from the .eml file since the mail body sits between the first and second occurrence. After the second occurrence the attachments follow.

Comment 4

[Jérôme Bouat]

The organisation I'm working has quite no money but it can leverage the number of users and finally help to make Thunderbird a standard. There is no problem if this issue has low priority : I just explained the benefit for all users.

About the script that examines the saved .eml files : I don't want to run such script because I don't want to perform a change without the behalf of the users.

How to save an email as pdf with one click ? Thanks.

Comment 5

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

(In reply to Jérôme Bouat from comment #4)
> How to save an email as pdf with one click ? Thanks.
Not in one click. You need to install some software that will create virtual a "PDF printer". There are lots of (free) products around that do that, for example FreePDF (which requires Ghostscript). With that it's a couple/few clicks.