329660 - attachment encoded in downloaded email is never the less downloaded again to view.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 629738

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[hacksaw]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050524 Fedora/1.0.4-4 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060100 Firefox/1.5.0.1

I got a email with a pdf attached, and watched it download for a while. I can view the source, and see the encoded binary. However, if I click on the attachment name to view it, it tries to download the email again.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. view an email with an attachment
2 [review]. try to view attachment
3 [review].

Actual Results:  
Download screen pops up

Expected Results:  
File is unpacked from already downloaded email and displayed.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

what version of TB are you using? 

Comment 2

[hacksaw]

I'm using 1.5. I have updated the version field to reflect this.

Comment 3

[Heino Wachter]

This occurs always when an email includes a forwarded email with an attachment. Then the attachment could never be opened. The only way to get the attachment ist to store away the attached email as an external eml file and ropen that from the menu.

Comment 4

[thedrs]

very annoying bug for a long time already.
imagine having to wait 1 minute until you see your mail in the preview pane because it has a 5 meg movie attached and then double click on the movie and wait another minute until it re-downloads even though it is already local.

this happens on version 2.0.0.14 (20080421) too.
I would have updated the version above but i can't.

Comment 5

[haydnlowe]

I have the same experience on 3.0.3 - using IMAP (IMAP is working much better in v3)

This is EXTREMELY frustrating if bandwidth is a limitation.

Please fix Thunderbird to only download emails once, and decode/extract the attachment from the already downloaded message

Comment 6

[haydnlowe]

I'm using Windows XP

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

hadyn, thedrs, Heino, hacksaw,

do you still see this when using version 6 or newer?

if you no longer see problem on newer release, please change resolution to WORKSFORME.
if you do see the problem on newer release, please update the bug with details.

Comment 8

[thedrs]

Confirmed - bug still exists in TB 6.0.2 :(

recreate: 
send your self a 5MB wmv movie from another mail address.
open TB with preview pane
select your incoming mail with 5MB file
wait for attachment+email to load
double click on the attachment - you will see a download dialog and will have to wait for the attachment to DL again.

solution should use the temp area where the MIME attachment already exists from the first download to open it instead of re-downloading.

I believe this bug on mass scale usage of TB users around the world causes a lot of BW waste.

Comment 9

[:aceman]

Is this IMAP-only problem?

Comment 10

[:Irving Reid (No longer working on Firefox)]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740453 (which is being worked on) may be a duplicate of this.

Comment 11

[costinel]

this behaviour still ocurs on tb 24.3.0
i connect over a slow vpn and it's easily reproductible with any attachment: slow down the network link between client and server, then watch tb download the attachment when clicking the email, then downloading again when clicking the attachment name.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

duping forward to bug 629738 which has more analysis.
This problem ends up not being solved when bug 629738 is fixed, then please reopen this bug.