230441 - Paper clip icon for messages with attachments does not appear until message is read

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 199979

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[david_thatcher]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5a (20040105)

Recieve message with attachment, paperclip does not show. Once message is 
marked as read the paperclip shows.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Recieve an email with an attachment.
Actual Results:  
No paperclip icon next to message in message list.

Expected Results:  
Paperclip icon should be next to message in message list.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

by design. for imap we don't know it has attachments till we fetch the body

Comment 2

[david_thatcher]

Could we have Thunderbird correct this when the mailbox in question is POP?

Comment 3

[Scott MacGregor]

*** Bug 230446 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Samir L. Boulema]

Would like to see this behaviour changed 2

Comment 5

[Andre Knoche]

Isn't this a duplicate of bug #199979?

Comment 6

[Scott MacGregor]

i've helped this a little bit by setting the attachment flag when the junk
controls download the message body. 

Comment 7

[geo. anderson]

>>by design. for imap we don't know it has attachments till we fetch the body<<

Hmmm... shouldn't you/can't you know?  I'm a fairly new user and found today
that I could not scan my "Sent" folder to identify messages with attachments.  I
sometimes do this to delete larger messages because I do file copies of the
folders between a machine at work and my server at home so I want to keep the
file sizes down.  It doesn't seem like setting the paper clip icon should be so
hard to do.

Thanks for the good work.

Comment 8

[Bryan K. Walton]

(In reply to comment #1)
> by design. for imap we don't know it has attachments till we fetch the body

Not that I hold MS Outlook up as a standard bearer, but we have users here using
Outlook with IMAP.  And Outlook (at least 2000 and 2002 versions) do have this
ability.  Outlook only fetches the headers but is able to ascertain whether
there is an attachment.  So I believe this should be possible for Thunderbird.

Comment 9

[bluppfisk]

Confirm that, also on Windows XP. I think this bug deserves a higher severity
status because it is vital in the process of detecting possible viruses.

Comment 10

[Marcin]

Very annoying bug... Fix it, please.

Comment 11

[jwq]

Picking up on comment #5 from André, this does appear to be a duplicate of Bug
199979. Note that other similar bug reports, Bug 223572, Bug 228884 and Bug
229429, have all been marked as duplicates of Bug 199979.

Comment 12

[Robert Harvey]

Well, as for me, I'm going to put my two pennyworth in here, rather than in
199979, because that is flagged 'minor' which I disagree with quite hard. It's
also curious that 199979 is 'new' and this one 'unconfirmed'.

I think the paperclip icon should appear before messages are opened.  I want to
know what to avoid.  I've just done a dummy run and found that it cannot be made
to appear even if the attachment is visible in the preview pane - the email has
to be opened.  (0.7.1 on XP)

As for problems with Imap, I've read the discussion in
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=630684 and it seems to me that if
there is any ambiguity in doing it from the headers, all that is needed is a
different coloured paperclip, or a question mark, or something in that column.

I think the comparison with OE/Outlook is valid - if we can't be better than
them, why bother?  Eudora, Lotus notes, Pegasus all manage to flag attachments.

Comment 13

[Robert Harvey]

I've just noticed.
The behaviour is similar in the 'sent' folder - you don't get a paperclip until
you've displayed - or previewed - the message.

Comment 14

[Raanan Barzel]

The presence of attachments, according to my version of RFC 1521, is indicated
in the header and has nothing to do with junk control. A paper clip can be
displayed as soon as the message arrives in the inbox, in exactly the same way
the sender or the subject are displayed. For sent messages this is even less
understandable.

If pop and imap require different behavior, then implement different behavior,
but there is no reason in the growing world of spam to not provide this feature.

The fact that it was not built-in by design does not preclude changing the design.

There is no point in discussing which bug number is relevant, just add the
feature, please.

 

Comment 15

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 199979 ***