295286 - Thunderbird can't open MS Outlook eml attachments

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 77811

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Greg Murphy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

My work still uses Microsoft Outlook as their email program.  When I forward my
email to my home computer, thunderbird is not able to open the ".eml"
attachments that Outlook apparently uses.  I don't know if this is proprietary
and there's anything you can do or not.  I sure hope there's a fix for this as I
really enjoy Thunderbird and think it's much better than Outlook.  Keep up the
good work guys.  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Have somebody email you a message attachment using microsoft Outlook.
2.  Try to open it.
3.  Cuss when you realize you can't open the eml attachment and have to switch
back to using Outlook.  :(

Actual Results:  
Had to switch back to using Outlook instead of thunderbird.  Bummer.

Expected Results:  
It would be great if thunderbird was able to open the Outlook ".eml" attachments
like outlook does.

I don't know if this is a proprietary problem or not.  I hope not as i'd really
rather be using Thunderbird instead of Outlook.

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

Duplicate of/related to bug 239685?

Comment 2

[OstGote!]

Do you mean the winmail.dat problem? (like Bug 207107)

See Bug 77811 -- Inline viewer for Microsoft proprietary mail formats (ms-tnef,
etc.) ["winmail.dat"]

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 242959 ***

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

not a dup...this still doesn't work, at least for me.

Comment 5

[Worcester12345]

(In reply to comment #4)
> not a dup...this still doesn't work, at least for me.

Not working here on an hourly from this morning off "Patrocles" build machine.

Comment 6

[David A. Wheeler]

This is probably (primarily) a duplicate of Bug 77811 - you can make any file end in ".eml", but I believe many are really in TNEF format, which is the issue in bug 77811.

Comment 7

[Worcester12345]

Most likely not related, but for those looking for this bug:
Bugzilla Bug 309566
when sending attachement with long or multibyte filename and receiver uses Outlook, the filename is changed to att00XXX.xxx

Comment 8

[rsx11m]

That's a combination of bug 77811 with bug 394823 for adding some intelligence of file format other than its extension. Thus, duping per in comment #6 after no further opinions came in during the last two years.

Comment 9

[Arkaine55]

This is still an issue as of Thunderbird 9.0

When a person forwards an email as an attachment using Outlook, Thunderbird sees it as a 0 byte "ForwardedMessage.eml" attachment. Outlook shows the attachment name as the subject line of the attached email, but thats unnecessary for this to function properly. (Incidentally, sending an email as an attachment in Thunderbird to Outlook results in a file that Outlook opens in Thunderbird)

If you re-forward the email without changing the attachments, Outlook is no longer able to read the attached email.

Outlook to Outlook works as expected & Thunderbird to Thunderbird works as expected.

It may be interesting to note the GMail web client does not like either Outlook or Thunderbird's methods for sending emails as attachments. It responds to method the same way the opposite client responds to them.


The LookOut Add-On (fix of bug 77811) does not fix this issue.

The boundary/header section for one such attachment is:

--90e6ba6e8b8ece60ea04b48d086a
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Disposition: attachment
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
X-Attachment-Id: 8886000fe213c691_0.2

And the content in the source is not empty, and I can be base64 decode it into the full source of an email. Which can then be opened by Thunderbird without a problem.