727448 - Email as Attachment from other clients (Outlook) claims 0 bytes, but isn't

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 580017

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Arkaine55]

Attachment: email source - (Outlook) email with attachment.eml

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.77 Safari/535.7

Steps to reproduce:

1. Forward a message as an attachment (using Outlook) on another email.
2. Tried to open the attachment using Thunderbird 9.0.1


Actual results:

3. The attachment shows as 0 bytes and Gives the message:
"This attachment appears to be empty.
Please check with the person who sent this.
Often company firewalls or antivirus programs will destroy attachments."


Expected results:

Viewing the source of the email, I can see that the attachment is NOT empty.
The attachment header is:
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Disposition: attachment
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
X-Attachment-Id: 27eb00be3ba2ba40_0.1

Decoding the content of this section using a base64 decoder results in a completely readable email that I can open in Thunderbird.

Thunderbird does not seem to understand how to process the "Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64"

Forwarding an email as an attachment similarly via Thunderbird has the attachment header:
Content-Type: message/rfc822; name="Attached Message"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Attached Message"

This displays inline in Thunderbird and can also be opened separately in a new window.

Thunderbird should be able to base64-decode the attached Outlook message and allow it to AT LEAST be opened in a new window without an error, if not also displayed inline.

Comment 1

[Arkaine55]

Attachment: email source - (Outlook) attached email decoded.eml

This is the base64-decoded source of the attached email from the original bug attachment

Comment 2

[Arkaine55]

Attachment: email source - (Thunderbird 9.0.1) email with attachment.eml

This is an examle of the same email, forwarded as an attachment via Thunderbird to show how the attachment is encoded differently.

Comment 3

[Arkaine55]

It may also be useful to note that this bug was reported before (Bug 295286) which was marked as a duplicate of Bug 77811. But this has nothing to do with Microsoft proprietary mail formats (a separate issue). So that characterization was incorrect.

This bug continues to occur even with the LookOut (v 1.2.13) Add-on installed (which was the suggested fix in one bug report/thread).

Also having just updated to version 10.0.1 I can confirm this is still an issue.