Open
Bug 587869
Opened 14 years ago
Updated 2 years ago
CSV attachment displayed as text instead of opening in Excel
Categories
(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)
Tracking
(thunderbird3.1 ?)
NEW
Tracking | Status | |
---|---|---|
thunderbird3.1 | --- | ? |
People
(Reporter: mike001, Unassigned)
References
()
Details
(Whiteboard: [gs])
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100802 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.2
Just-upgraded to 3.1.2, and can no longer open attachments containing CSV (comma-separated values) part. Before upgrade to 3.1.2, used to open Excel.
Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Receive a multipart-mixed email with a "text/plain" part and "application/octet-stream" parts
2. Double-click to open the attachment
3 [review].
Actual Results:
Attachment is displayed by TB as text.
Expected Results:
Attachment will be opened by Excel
First part header:
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
[contains "body" of message]
Second part header:
Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
name="P1YYMMDD.CSV"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="P1YYMMDD.CSV"
May have same cause as Bug 587660. Have full email available.
[again selected "Windows XP" as platform because I'm not sure what "NT 5.1" is]
[severity set at "normal", but if parsing "application/octet-stream" is broken, should be higher]
Reporter | ||
Updated•14 years ago
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Whiteboard: [gs]
Updated•14 years ago
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status-thunderbird3.1:
--- → ?
Comment 1•14 years ago
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This is INVALID as Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="P1YYMMDD.CSV" clearly doesn't say something like application/vnd.ms-excel.
Mike, does it work better is the attachment is named "P1YYMMDD.csv" ?
Reporter | ||
Comment 2•14 years ago
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I don't think it's invalid, as -- according to the user -- this used to work. From what I can tell, there IS code to handle "digging into" application/octet-stream attachments and deciding what to do based on the filename extension; see:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/mime/src/mimei.cpp#850
I don't know for sure that code ever gets involved when trying to display/save attachments, but I don't know what else it purpose would be. I tried to figure out what MIME type would be returned based on a particular filename extension, but the "mapping" of extension-to-MIME-type is OS and user-dependent.
Someone more familiar with where execution would proceed, given a particular filename extension, could probably determine if there were any changes in that area between early 3.x and 3.1.2.
If the filename/extension is case-sensitive, I'd say that's a bug (at least by my cursory examination of RFCs 2183 and 1521).
Finally, "This is INVALID as [...] clearly doesn't say something like application/vnd.ms-excel."
No, it doesn't -- but it doesn't say "application/vnd.thunderbird", either. If TB isn't supposed to try to open a compatible "AppHelper", then it certainly shouldn't display the attachment as text; the user should be asked if he/she wants to save the file.
Comment 3•14 years ago
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I have the same problem : I want to open csv files with excel and txt files with notepad.
But both attachments are mime type Text/Plain. So Thunderbird always use the program associated with txt files.
The only solution I found is not to associate txt files with notepad. Each time I want to open a txt file, I have to confirm the message box (without prompting the option always do this action).
I tried to manually modify the file mimeTypes.rdf in my profile. But I don't find a solution.
If someone knows a better solution, I will use it.
Comment 4•8 years ago
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This is the same as bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300168
Comment 5•8 years ago
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I've found a work-around. As noted above, the problem is when a mail client marks the attachment as Text/Plain. Outlook handles csv attachments correctly (open in Excel) because Excel is a Microsoft product, so it presumably "just knows". To fix this for Thunderbird, the client must send the csv attachment as Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel. Thunderbird, as a client, DOES do this.
I am using mail(x). To make this work with the mailx client, the following entry must exist in /etc/mime.types:
application/vnd.ms-excel csv
That did the trick for me. Other clients (e.g. mutt), also have mime.type settings.
Updated•2 years ago
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Severity: normal → S3
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Description
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