321325 - attachment panel taller than needed

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Emmanuel Touzery]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

this is using thunderbird 1.5rc2 on windowsXP.
i got a mail with 12 attachments.
opening it in a new window (double click on the email title) to get a bigger window, i get exactly 50% of the time a very big attachment box and the other 50% of time a normally sized attachment box.
restarting thunderbird does not help, the problem still comes up.

i'll attach screenshots to show what i'm talking about.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Emmanuel Touzery]

Attachment: thunderbird main window with the attachments

Comment 2

[Emmanuel Touzery]

Attachment: attachment bar is too big

Comment 3

[Emmanuel Touzery]

Attachment: attachment bar is sized OK

Comment 4

[Ray Booysen]

DUPE

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 223340 ***

Comment 5

[Emmanuel Touzery]

i don't think it's a duplicate: i'm talking about the size of the attachment bar i full screen mode that is of different height FOR THE SAME MAIL. which means: sometimes it's one height, sometimes it's another height. randomly. there are not enough attachments to block the view of the message. thunderbird is wasting space in the attachment bar SOMETIMES.
see 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=206689
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=206690

but maybe i'm wrong so i don't reopen the bug, i let you decide.

Comment 6

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

This bug is about a different issue than the one described in bug 223340.  Bug 223340 has existed for quite some time and has to do with the attachmdnts pane not being scrollable, so that if you have a large number of attachments, it gets bigger.  With enough attachments it will take up the entire Thunderbird window making it impossible to read the message body.

This bug is about a seperate issue htat has existed only fairly recently and has to do with the attachments bar sometimes being much larger than is required to display the number of attachmnents that are prestnt in the mail message.

Comment 7

[Emmanuel Touzery]

note that Shaddy Baddah noted that resizing the window makes the attachment pane take a normal size again.

Comment 8

[Emmanuel Touzery]

more info: i now also got it even if the mail is not opened in a new window (with the mail still embedded normally in the thunderbird pane).
and there were only 3 attachments. they take one line to show, but with the wasted space it seems more like 3 lines. and i confirm that resizing the thunderbird window does make the attachment bar back at normal size.

Comment 9

[Emmanuel Touzery]

i found by coincidence this comment in mozi lla/mail/base/content/msgHdrViewOverlay.js:

  // IMPORTANT: make sure we uncollapse the attachment box BEFORE we start adding
  // our attachments to the view. Otherwise, layout doesn't calculate the correct height for
  // the attachment view and we end up with a box that is too tall.

this bug could really be related to that... but then again, i have no idea.

Comment 10

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

You can see this in the message pane in the 3-pane window as well.  In that case, I see it consistently on some messages when they're viewed immedateily after another message that does not have attachments -- as if the creation of the attachment panel causes it to be oversized.

Comment 11

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

*** Bug 354328 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

*** Bug 359591 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 361270 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 364687 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Does this bug also happen for you with the restyled attachment panel? I know that I was able to see this issue multiple times but I cannot reproduce it with the current nightly builds of Thunderbird 2.

Comment 16

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I think the worst of this has been fixed by bug 223340's patch -- that patch includes code that sets the size of the attachment panel every time a message is loaded; but in testing with 2pre-0302, I'm still seeing this symptom occasionally.  When I saw it, it was for a message with, say, enough attachments to require two or more rows in the panel but not so many that the scrollbar would necessarily be needed.  (Running with the pref
  mailnews.attachments.display.largeView
set to True.)

There is some refinement going on at bug 372068, in particular for the handling of the large vs. small icon mode, so this should be revisited after that patch is in place.  Don't know if that will be in place for 2.0 or not.

Comment 17

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

duh -- NOT 372068, but bug 370792 is where the refinement work is going on.

Comment 18

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

It's not visible for me with a test message and two lines of attachments under Thunderbird version 2.0pre (20070304) Mac OS X. The height is always set correctly. There is no unused space visible.

Comment 19

[Wayne Woods]

The only time I can get the attachments box to appear larger than necessary is if I resize the entire the window/pane *after* the message has loaded. This is an unfortunate, but accepted side-effect of having a stable attachments box, and is only minor because it's fixed when you change messages and it's still no taller than it was when the message first loaded. I haven't been able to reproduce this when a message is just loaded.

Comment 20

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

That's also not reproducable for me. Doesn't have the attachment panel a fixed height which can be changed by dragging it up and down? One side effect I can see when you drag it down and it's getting smaller then the height of an attachment box the whole attachment panel gets invisible.

Comment 21

[Wayne Woods]

(In reply to comment #20)
> One side effect I can
> see when you drag it down and it's getting smaller then the height of an
> attachment box the whole attachment panel gets invisible.

Yeah, that seems to be normal for splitters when they encounter a min-height... they collapse just like if you were using a grippy. The splitter is still present at the bottom of the window, at least, so you easily can bring the attachments box back again.

Comment 22

[Emmanuel Touzery]

Attachment: thunderbird2 screenshot

the problem is still present with thunderbird2, but the reasons have now changed. in thunderbird 1.5 it was some sort of layout bug happening 50% of the time, in thunderbird2 it's simply that the attachment bar seems to take 20% of the size of the window even if not needed. it forces you to resize it down if you had pictures in the mail and you wanted to see them.
it's not a huge deal but really, it ought to be automatic.

Comment 23

[Wayne Woods]

(In reply to comment #22)
> the problem is still present with thunderbird2, but the reasons have now
> changed.

I still can't reproduce what you're seeing. Can you please check that you have nothing in userChrome.css for Thunderbird? Also, do you have any add-ons installed, and which OS version are you using?

Comment 24

[Wayne Woods]

Sorry, never mind. I can reproduce it. But only in the message window, not the 3pane. So I can't reproduce comment 10. I'll have a look immediately.

Comment 25

[Wayne Woods]

The problem seems to be that in the message window, every attachment added contributes to the height of attachmentView, even though they may be added to the same row and therefore should only affect the width. For some reason, this isn't the case with the attachments box in the 3pane view.

For example, in Mac OS X, using large icon view, adding 1 attachment sets the box to 60px high, 2 to 110px, 3 tries to set it to 160px, 4 to 210px, etc. (the code restricts the max height, so you don't actually see the later heights). Each attachment adds 50px.

I can't see why this would happen at all, but especially why it only affects one view and not the other. The attachment boxes are set up the same way for both views.

Comment 26

[Emmanuel Touzery]

Attachment: with small icons

after your description, that each icon adds some vertical space, i tried to change the setting to use small icons instead of big icons.. it's actually quite worse than with big icons, example of how it looks in attachment.

i hope this can be fixed with final, i was really happy of finally not having anymore bad sizing of the attachment bar and now here comes this new one...

Comment 28

[peter Liepmann]

I use AVG, which attaches a message, 
"No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition. 
Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.20.9/1292 - Release Date: 2/21/2008 4:09 PM"
to each message.  This takes up a lot of screen real estate. 

I'd like to have the option of NOT showing the attachments pane, and have a marker in the message list that an email has an attachment instead.

FWIW, I 'solved' this by changing  AVG so it doesn't add a message to each email, but...it's less than optimal.

Comment 29

[Wayne Woods]

(In reply to comment #28)
> I'd like to have the option of NOT showing the attachments pane, and have a
> marker in the message list that an email has an attachment instead.

Hi Peter,

An option like this is definitely a new feature, and so should have its own bug entry. Please check that one doesn't already exist for the same feature, and feel free to file a request for it if there isn't :)

Comment 30

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Fixed by bug #511592?

Comment 31

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Emmanuel (and others) this issue is gone with latest TB 3.0.1?

I can't observe it from a very long time.

Comment 32

[Emmanuel Touzery]

yes i think it's gone in 3.x. i can't see it either anymore.

Comment 33

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Based on reporter comment #32, i close this issue as WFM because Thunderbird 2 builds are security & stability only.

Feel free to reopen it if I'm wrong.