attachments not opening in Thunderbird
This has only happened recently. I received an email with a photo attachments and this shoed as I could open it in MS Picture Mgr (my default for these). But all I got was a small red X in middle of a blank screen!
After a day or so puzzling this I went back into GMail which is my email provider and opened in ALL Mail the original email received and the attachments (photos) shoed there and I was able to view them!
This has never happened before. Any ideas? The sender is not filtered as 'spam' and I previously received emails from him without attachments
Thank you
Solución elegida
I received a package from the post office. it contained a broken vase. FEDEX delivered a replacement. It was not broken. Surely the front door would have caused the same result in both instances.
I know it is a bit of a childish way of putting it, but to compare what an anti virus does with web mail with what it does with a mail client is similar to that simplistic view.
When you get an attachment in web mail, the first your anti virus knows of it is that a file named whatever.pdf is being downloaded from the internet.
When an attachment comes in to a mail client it arrives as a mime encoded text stream. The first thing the anti virus needs to do if it wants to scan the attachment is to decode the mime encoded text stream and create a binary file names Whatever.pdf. But they do not do that after the mail arrives in Thunderbird, they hold up the delivery, they pull the mail apart, scan the bits that interest them and in some cases put it all back together again. But like Humpty Dumpty. It does not always work out.
The failure to put it all back together again is most often seen in association with inserting headers that the message has been scanned. Or worse still those horrors that insert text into the email saying it has been scanned.
Email issues with anti virus programs are very very common. Most people these days do not use mail clients. They use web mail. With the user base shrinking anti virus programs do not get the same levels of rigorous field testing they used to.
This link is to some of the issues we have recorded in Thunderbird with Avast. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Antivirus_Related_Performance_Issues#AVAST
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Perhaps the attachment was corrupted by anti virus scanning of incoming mail.
If this was the case surely my Avast Securitywould have stopped it at my GMail stage?
Thank you for replying
Solución elegida
I received a package from the post office. it contained a broken vase. FEDEX delivered a replacement. It was not broken. Surely the front door would have caused the same result in both instances.
I know it is a bit of a childish way of putting it, but to compare what an anti virus does with web mail with what it does with a mail client is similar to that simplistic view.
When you get an attachment in web mail, the first your anti virus knows of it is that a file named whatever.pdf is being downloaded from the internet.
When an attachment comes in to a mail client it arrives as a mime encoded text stream. The first thing the anti virus needs to do if it wants to scan the attachment is to decode the mime encoded text stream and create a binary file names Whatever.pdf. But they do not do that after the mail arrives in Thunderbird, they hold up the delivery, they pull the mail apart, scan the bits that interest them and in some cases put it all back together again. But like Humpty Dumpty. It does not always work out.
The failure to put it all back together again is most often seen in association with inserting headers that the message has been scanned. Or worse still those horrors that insert text into the email saying it has been scanned.
Email issues with anti virus programs are very very common. Most people these days do not use mail clients. They use web mail. With the user base shrinking anti virus programs do not get the same levels of rigorous field testing they used to.
This link is to some of the issues we have recorded in Thunderbird with Avast. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Antivirus_Related_Performance_Issues#AVAST
Thanks Matt for this - I fully understand what you are saying!
It has only happened a couple of times and I have used Thunderbird for years as I find it easier to keep important emails in folders in Thunderbird as I find I have not the same options with Web Mail.
I take your point though. I am now worried I have missed some emails incoming so I go to WebMail to check. Paranoid or what?!!!
I have tried to use just GMail but cannot easily find emails I might have received or sent some months ago and TBird gives me this.
Thanks again
I certainly find missed mails in gmails spam folder. Usually replies from the forum so folk think I am ignoring them