35587 - Attachments in forwarded mails(message/rfc822 part) should not appear like attachments in "top" mail

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Attachments, defect)

Description

[Henrik Gemal]

Currently the attachments for forwarded mails are shown in the dropdown 
attachment box, as described in:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23634

But this is somewhat wrong. With the current implementation it's impossible to 
see by the dropdown attachment box who attached which attachments.
For the user it will look like the last sender attached all the attachment, 
which he might have done and which he might NOT have done.

The "right" solution would be a dropdown attachment box next to each forwarded 
mail, and not just show all attachments in the "top" mail.

Comment 1

[rhp (gone)]

Sorry, I can tell you I am not going to get to this one before shipping.

- rhp

Comment 2

[Henrik Gemal]

That's alright...:)
The currently implementation is ok, but just not "right".

Comment 3

[Henrik Gemal]

Just changing subject.

Comment 4

[scottputterman]

moving to future milestone.

Comment 5

[fenella]

Assign it to [e-mail]

Comment 6

[scottputterman]

reassigning to ducarroz

Comment 7

[fenella]

To Esther...

Comment 8

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

won't fix.

Comment 9

[Trix Supremo]

verified resolution

Comment 10

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

I have changed my mind. We won't put an attachment box next to each inline
message but rather we could show an hierarchic list at the top. Also, I have a
fix in my tree which change the order we show the attachment in the list, I'll
show first the inline message and then it's attachment.

Comment 11

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

xref bug 203570.

Since it is now possible to open attached messages into their own message 
window, this bug could be fixed by simply showing the attachments belonging to 
the top-level message, ignoring the nested ones.  However, bug 203570 would need 
to be fixed so that the message window for the attached mail shows only the 
attachments belonging to it.

Comment 12

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Add "message/rfc822" to summary for ease of search.

Comment 13

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20051028 SeaMonkey/1.1a] (nightly) (W98SE)

Bug still there,
confirmed by bug 203570 comment 33 too.

Comment 14

[David :Bienvenu]

I think it's much more convenient to show the nested attachments in the top level msg. That saves you having to open the message/rfc822 attachment in a new window in order to see the attachments.

Comment 15

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

(In reply to comment #14)
> I think it's much more convenient to show the nested attachments in the top

I could concur with that;
yet some way to distinguish the actual attachments from the nested ones could be interesting;
may be as "an hierarchic list" as suggested in comment 10 ?

Comment 16

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Discovered while investigating bug 328324: the forwarded message's 
attachments don't appear in the containing message's attachment panel if 
Display Attachments Inline is turned off.

Comment 18

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to comment #11)
> xref bug 203570.
> Since it is now possible to open attached messages into their own message 
> window, this bug could be fixed by simply showing the attachments belonging to 
> the top-level message, ignoring the nested ones.  However, bug 203570 would need 
> to be fixed so that the message window for the attached mail shows only the 
> attachments belonging to it.

Bug 203570 IS fixed (thank you so much!!!), at least for those cases where the top msg is stored locally/non-IMAP (see my comm. 62 in bug 203570). So, to quote comment #11, "this bug could be fixed by simply... ignoring nested ones [attachments]"? As Mike's comment #16 points out, this bug 35587 does NOT occur when "show attachments inline" is OFF. I conclude from this:

==> There are two different sets of code for displaying the attachment panel:
1) a correct one (when "attachments inline" is OFF), and
2) a buggy one (when "attachments inline is ON").

In other words (correct me if I'm wrong): the patch for this bug is already existant, namely in the code fragment (2) that *correctly* displays the attachment panel when "view attachments inline" is OFF.

So perhaps there is hope on the horizon for a quick & easy fix to this age-old and often-duped bug? Would be another nice little step ahead towards resolving the whole issue of message/rfc822 .eml attachments as documented in meta Bug 269826?

Comment 19

[Mike Kaganski]

Attachment: Sample message with message/rfc822 attachment having its own attachments

TB 6.0.2 on Windows
The bug isn't fixed yet.

And the inline display of attachments makes the rfc822 attachment to be displayed under the wrong name (namely, the name of the previous attachment)

Comment 21

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Like comment 14 says, I think it's more convenient to show nested attachments. However, there's no easy way to show them as a tree in the current layout. I have an add-on[1] which does this, but I think it's a bad default, since it's really wasteful with space. I also don't really think it should go in-tree, since it's a lot of code for something that I think relatively few people will need.

I'm not averse to adding a pref for this for people (or businesses) who suffer from the ambiguity this causes. I know that adding prefs is the lazy way out of making a decision, but short of redesigning the attachment pane again, I don't see a good way of optimizing for both cases without a pref. I'd argue that it's reasonable to add prefs for cases where we can't/won't make one UI to rule them all. Granted, add-ons can fill that role, but I don't much like the idea of add-ons to fix bad UX, even if it's for a minority of users.

Thoughts?

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/attachment-tree/