290424 - IMAP: hang on downloading attachments

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Daniel Kasak]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050331 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050331 Firefox/1.0.2

I've had this behaviour for quite a while indeed. Since *way* back in the pre-
Mozilla-1.0 days.

If I double-click on an attachment, to open it directly into a known application
( eg if I double-click on a DOC attachment ), the downloading will often ( not
always ... could be dependant on size ) hang either part-way through, or right
at the start.

*** *** *** HOWEVER *** *** ***

If I right-click on the attachment and save it somewhere on my computer, the
download works perfectly, and I can then open a file manager an open my document.

This occurs under Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and various Linux distros.

I'm using a courier-imap ( with SSL ) IMAP server. I am *absolutely* *certain*
that it's not a problem with courier-imap, as downloading works if I choose to
save to a file.

If someone wants a test-case, I will endeavour to put up a test account on an
IMAP server and give people access to it to see for themselves.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Double-Click to open attachment into application.
Actual Results:  
IMAP fetch hangs either immediately, or part-way through ( pop-up status
indicator shows portion of message downloaded ).

Expected Results:  
Attachment should be completely downloaded and then passed to application.

Problem is intermittent.
Saving attachment to a file always works.

Comment 1

[Marius Kotsbak]

Could this problem be the same as described in bug #278231 ? 

Comment 2

[Marius Kotsbak]

I found the cause of my problem in this debian bug:   
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=297952   
   
I see in my attachment preferences that .doc was associated with an old   
removed version of OpenOffice.org. It did work OK when I updated it.  
  
Could this be the case for bug reporter too?  
  
Anyway, thunderbird should show an error message instead of just hanging while  
downloading the attachment...  

Comment 3

[Daniel Kasak]

No that's not the problem here.

Sometimes the attachment will be downloaded fully and passed to OpenOffice, and
sometimes it hangs before the download in complete. My OpenOffice is installed
in /opt/OpenOffice.org and always has been. There is no version number in the
installation path, so upgrades don't affect me this way. I do note that this
could cause problems under Windows where OpenOffice installs into a different
path each time, but this causes a *different* problem.

Comment 4

[Daniel Kasak]

Since around Thunderbird-1.5 this bug seems to have disappeared for us. I have verified on our old courier-imap server and our new dbmail-imap server. Client-side, I have tested under Gentoo Linux and Windows 2000 with various versions of Thunderbird-1.5 +.