426549 - Drag-and-drop of file(s) onto application icon doesn't open a new compose window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 361421

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Paul J. Lucas]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13
Build Identifier: 20080213

If I drag-and-drop any kind of file(s) onto the Mail application's icon (say, in the Dock), Mail will accept the file(s) as a drop target and, once accepted, Mail will open a new message-compose window with the file(s) pre-attached as attachments.  Thunderbird's application icon does not similarly allow file(s) to be dropped onto it.

Perhaps related, if, in Terminal on the command line, I type:

$ open -b com.apple.mail my_file.jpg

then Mail opens a new message-compose window with the file(s) pre-attached as attachments.  If instead I type:

$ open -b org.mozilla.thunderbird my_file.jpg

then Thunderbird does nothing.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
For the drag-and-drop problem described, simply drag-and-drop file(s) onto Thunderbird's application icon (either in /Applications or in the Dock).

For the command-line problem described, simply type the "open" command as shown.
Actual Results:  
Nothing happened.

Expected Results:  
It should have done what Mail does.

While this might not seem important, it makes it difficult for other applications to script the default mailer application to instruct them to open a new message-compose window with file(s) pre-attached, e.g., a photo-editing application might have a "Send photo(s) by e-mail" command that launcher the user's default mailer with the photo(s) pre-attached.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

Similar to bug 394823, requesting a logic to detect the file type based on content. The question is how a non-message file should be interpreted then.
Your suggestion is apparently to treat any non-message file passed on the
command line (or by drag-and-drop onto the icon) as attachment.