149049 - Can't send from Excel or Powerpoint when opened from mail [MAPI]

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Simple MAPI, defect)

Description

[Michael Baffoni]

To reproduce: send (via whatever means) yourself an excel attachment.  Open the
attachment from mail.  Make a change in Excel, and save it.  Now go to
File->sent to->Mail recipient.

what it does: Nothing.  No window, no error.
Expected results: A new compose window should open with the excel document attached.

Workaround: Save the excel document with a different name (add "-1" for
example). It will now send properly.

Sounds like a conflict between the file saved in the temp folder being the same
name as the temp copy used by excel (or is it Mozilla?) to send the file. 
Strangely enough, word does NOT have this problem.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.0+) Gecko/20020603

Comment 1

[Arno Roefs]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530
Build: 2002053012

Confirmed, moving to NEW.

Comment 2

[Michael Baffoni]

There has been no movement on this bug.  I would expect this to be a problem for
corporate users of Mozilla or mozilla-derived browsers, so I'm surprised no one
has even looked at this.  It still exists in 

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020818

Comment 3

[Rajiv Dayal]

if this still happens, nominating for next release.

Comment 4

[Joe Konecny]

Probably related...   Mozilla 1.2a crashes for me every time I use the "send to"
feature.  

Comment 5

[Michael Baffoni]

BTW, I've done some verification and I'm sure it is a temp folder conflict where
Moz is saving the file to the same folder, with the same name, that Excel needs
in the temp folder in order to make a temp copy for send.  If you open the file
from within Mozilla into Excel, then delete all files in the docs and
settings/user/local settings/temp , it will send the email fine.  Is there
anyway that we can save a temp copy to a subfolder of temp (e.g. docs and
settings/user/local settings/temp/mozilla) rather than into temp itself, in
order to avoid this conflict? 

Comment 6

[Michael Baffoni]

Sorry, goof - you can't just delete the file, you have to saveas to a different
folder.  Even if you save to a different name in the same folder however, you
have the same problem, but if you save as within Excel to a different folder
(even a subfolder of temp), it will suddenly be able to email because it no
longer keeps a write-lock on the file being opened, and it do a temp save to the
temp folder.

Comment 7

[Michael Baffoni]

I found the keywords list.  ;-)  Would it be appropriate to assign the mail4 or
at least mail6 keyword(s) to this?

I noticed that something is making a "mozmapi" folder in the system temp folder.
 Was this a fix started but someone didn't actually hook it up yet (so that it
still saves to the system temp folder rather than system temp/mozmapi)?  If so,
this could really be a low-effort fix.

Comment 8

[Michael Baffoni]

Adding mail3 keyword.  I've determined that this is not only blocking Excel but
also Powerpoint.  Asking for blocking 1.4 because this is really a problem in an
any environment that depends on Office working seemlessly with Mozilla/Netscape.

BTW, is this necessarily a MAPI component issue if it is being caused by where
the attachment is being saved, not by the process of handing off via the MAPI
process (I can replicate this problem by just opening a file from the active
temp folder, not just from within mail - but since the temp folder is where mail
saves the file prior to launching, it causes the problem)?  Shouldn't this be an
attachments component problem?

Comment 9

[Michael Baffoni]

OK, so maybe it is a MAPI issue.  I did some experimenting with NS4.8 and Moz1.4
nightly and did some searching with the code.  When NS4.8 opens an attachment to
excel, it saves the filename exactly as it is in the email to the root of the
users temp directory.  However, when excel does it's temporary file save
operation, it for some reason is smart enough to rename the temp file to
1_<filename.xls>.  When you open the file from Mozilla, it opens the attachment
from the root of the users temp dir by the name of the attachment.  However,
when Excel does the file-send to mail recipient, that is when it creates the
"moz_mapi" directory.  

Looking at the sourcecode, I can see that behaviour in msgMapiHook.cpp, but
there must be a bug in that code that isn't allowing the file to be saved into
the moz_mapi folder - the process just dies without even a whimper and no file
is created within the folder, not even a temp.  Unfortunately the code is way
beyond my comprehension (I picked up what I could via the comments), so I have
no idea why it is not properly saving the file into the moz_mapi folder then
opening up the msg composition window.  

Strangely enough, when you take a word attachment and open it in mozilla, it
does the same thing, except that when you go to file->send to mail, it is
actually copied properly into the temp\moz_mapi folder (and the filename.doc is
changed to filename_.doc which appears superfluous to me) and a compose window
opens with it attached.  So perhaps Excel and powerpoint (at least Excel
97&2000, and Powerpoint97&2000) have slightly different information passed back
via mapi that is different enough from how word does it that there is a problem.

This is a severe productivity problem since it would effect 50% of our users if
I could switch them to Netscape7(+), and we have been having problems staying on
NS4.8 for a while now (problems on websites).

Comment 10

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

mozilla1.4 shipped. unsetting blocking1.4 request.

Comment 11

[Michael Baffoni]

Hoping for more visibility on this bug.  Also, it is silly to have this targeted
to Moz 1.2 (forgive me if you feel I'm stepping on toes), but it would be great
if the module owner could at least target this to 1.6a.  Thanks!

Comment 12

[chris hofmann]

out of time for 1.5, but added some folks to the cc list to get this one visable.  

Comment 13

[Michael Baffoni]

I don't know if it was accidental, but this seems to be fixed in the seamonkey
1.8b2 builds, and in Thunderbird 1.02 (sending within Excel was totally hosed in
1.0 - attachments showed up as ####.tmp files).  I'll mark this as WFM.