448580 - Attachment "Save All..." and "Detach All..." UI should optionally allow per-attachment filename choice

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Richard Mlynarik]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.16 (20080707)

I have a message with mutiple attachments.

When I select "Save All..." (or "Detach All...") from the attachment pop-up
context menu I should be offered an option by the dialog to "Specify Filename
for each Attachment", which would then pop-up a _series_ of dialogs, one for
each attachment, in place of the existing one-size-fits-all dialog that asks
the user only for a directory and then, based on its own Thunderbird-internal
logic, chooses the filenames for each attachment itself.

Yes, I know I can achieve the same effect by manually clicking on each
attachment one by one and invoking "Save As..." or "Detach..." (or I could
if weren't for Bug 448576), but the point of computers was supposed to be
to serve humans, not vice-versa.

(Besides, if the argument were that "that can already be done", then why
offer "Detach..." at all when "Save As..." followed by "Delete" is
less-conveniently available?)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click-right on attachments area of message
2. Select "Save All.." menu item

Actual Results:  
Only choice offered by UI is to specify a directory (into which TB-chosen filenames will be written) or to cancel.

Expected Results:  
I'd like a button on the dialog labelled something like
"Specify Filename for each Attachment"
which would then run the moral equivalent of the "Save As..." dialog (or "Detach As...", as appropriate) for each attachment.

Comment 1

[David von Oheimb]

Regarding "Save All...", you can achieve the desired effect by manually selecting all/multiple attachments (click on the first one, then shift-click on the last one), then right-click any of them and choose "Save As...".
Regarding "Detach All...", I've just tried to implement support for the analogous effect, but this seems to be more difficult to do (at least I did not succeed).

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Sounds good to me, and should be confirmed:
- need to check for duplicates
- need to re-check current UI, e.g. with regards to workaround of comment 1, does that still apply?
This is especially interesting for people who have a default directory set for saving all attachments, something almost completely ignored/inaccessible by the current UI.