587869 - CSV attachment displayed as text instead of opening in Excel

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Michael A. Pasek]

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]

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

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" ?

Comment 2

[Michael A. Pasek]

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

[[e-mail]]

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

[Mark Foley]

This is the same as bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300168

Comment 5

[Mark Foley]

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.