325217 - Modified files from email attachments are deleted on exiting

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 220808

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Michael Rhodes]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird version 1.5 (20051201) from mozilla.com

When you open an attachment from an email, it is saved to the user's temp folder. If a user edits this file and presses save, the application (e.g., Word) will save the file to the temporary folder. There are two problems:

1. User doesn't know where they saved the file to (C:\documents and settings\username\temp or whatever)
2. Thunderbird will delete this file when it exits, even if it is different from the one attatched to the email.

A user can therefore open, modify and save a file, then think it is safe; however, it will be deleted when Thunderbird exits.

I can think of some ideas as to a solution, however, not knowing the Mozilla codebase I don't know how hard they would be to implement:

1. Mark temporary file as read-only. This should/may if you are lucky make the application inform the user that they need to make a copy of the file to edit it. The user can then save the document to where they want before editing the file.
2. Check Last Modified dates before deleting temporary files -- if the modified date is more recent than the creation date, then assume user has modified it and don't delete it.
3. Thunderbird could prompt on exit for the user to save the documents somewhere useful if they have been modified, then delete the temporary file.

A combination may be a good solution, using 1 as the initial measure (hopefully application will handle read-only files gracefully) and then 2 & 3 as a fallback solution.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open an email with an attachment that can be edited
2. Open the attachment and edit it.
3. Save the ammendments using ctrl-s (document will be saved to temp folder)
4. Exit editor
5. Exit Thunderbird
Actual Results:  
Modified document is deleted silently.

Expected Results:  
User is prompted to save the document by editing program somewhere other than the temp folder, so they don't loose their changes.

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

Duplicate of bug 244934 -> Core bug 220808.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 220808 ***