181842 - mail downloads attachments once when displaying the email , then again when asked to save attachments

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 46233

(MailNews Core :: Attachments, defect)

Description

[Olaf Schnapauff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Mozilla in several cases does not cache properly what it has already downloaded
once, e.g. while displaying the message. If you after displaying the message
save attachments, they get downloaded again.

In the more general case, whatever has been loaded once should never ever again
get pulled over the wire, unless it changed.

This breaks offline working / working over slow modem lines and is a serious
regression over what to expect by IMAP/IMAP-disconnected mode

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.open mail with large attachment, see how it gets downloaded
2.save all on attachments
3. see them get downloaded again

Actual Results:  
multiple downloads of cachable material

Expected Results:  
cache everything it has already downloaded. never ever again download what
you already pulled over the wire.

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

related: bug 46233

Comment 2

[Olaf Schnapauff]

Repeated downloading happens also if no inline attachments exist and for all 
attachment types (different from 46233 original report). It also reloads the
attachment when displaying the message again, or stepping out and back into the
folder. In general, the attachments fail to cache properly when working online.

Comment 3

[Olaf Schnapauff]

Related: 183068

Comment 4

[Honglin Su]

Have been using Netscape/Mozilla for a few years, I really want to see the
improvement. 

For Netscape 4.x on UNIX (Solaris/Linux), it doesn't handle nicely for large
attachment or it doesn't cache the attachment at all. The netscape messenger
will download the attachment first, when you open it, it will download it again.

From my laptop (Windows), Netscape 4.x (e.g. 4.79/4.8) has the offline options,
basically it works fine.

While for Netscape 7.0/7.01/7.02 or Mozilla 1.2.1/1.3, the large mail attachment
is still a headache on Windows or Solaris/Linux. I came across the exact problem
stated in the bug 181842. Once you set the offline option, it works well as long
as you maintain the same session and the attachment is still not that big (e.g.
1~3MB). Once it is large enough (say more than 4 MB), even if you set the
offline option, the attachment is not cached, it will be downloaded whenever you
access this very message, and download again when you want to save it locally.
To make it worse, when you restart netscape/mozilla, all the emails/attachments
have to be downloaded again and again.

Highly appreciate if it could be fixed in the upcoming release.

Thanks a lot!

Honglin

Comment 5

[Bob Atkins]

Is anyone working on this bug? This is a major problem with mail handling that
was reported last year and yet the problem is still evident in Mozilla 1.4 and
is driving several people that I support who use IMAP nuts. It seems like it
should be fixable without a huge amount of effort.

Comment 6

[kmike]

Whats worse, mozilla downloads *whole* message again for every attachment it saves.
I just got an email with more than 10 small attachments (30-100k). Whole message
size is about 1Meg. I choose "Save All" from Attachments menu, and now I'm
sitting  for about an hour looking on "Downloading message" status bar, which is
going from 0 to 100% for every attachment, then back to 0%. After every drop to
0%, next attached file appears in directory specified for saving files.

Modem link is fully used all that time according to netload applet, and as
there're no other applications consuming bandwidth, I think that mozilla
downloads whole 1Meg again and again.
I can provide IMAP log if needed.

Linux nightly build 20030801 here.

Comment 7

[Frane]

solving Bug #131586 would probably solve this one
this is not proper IMAP behavior
and could some one put here blocking Flag

Comment 8

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Why did R.K.Aa say this was "related" to bug 46233 in comment 1, rather than a 
dupe?  I don't see a difference...

Bug 46233 comment 7 says "this happens for all attachments" which is contrary to 
comment 2 here, and the summary was updated at that point.  I also don't see any 
distinction about inline attachment in that bug after the original report.

Comment 9

[Patrick]

agreeing with comment 8 and duping to bug 46233

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 46233 ***

Comment 10

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Verified dup.