try to forward (inline) and get "attached message part" and largely empty email - grr!
Using thunderbird 68.7.0, when I try to forward (inline) any one of a large set of emails in my inbox that exhibits this problem, and not all do, I click "forward" and I get a largely empty email to forward, except for 5 lines describing the immediate forwarding address details (see attached pic), and an undesired attachment "Attached Message Part" (which, now that I look, has the (html) content I desire to forward). I am set for "inline" in composition settings. What I expect is to see the entire content to forward inline, with no attachments otherwise unless they were in the original message to be forwarded. Thus, I simply cannot forward these messages inline (but I can reply, which loses any attachments, so not a good substitute)). (I could find nothing on this, only some ancient complaints about not being able to get all the images into the forwarded message.) Perhaps I should go check the source code to see what would create "Attached Message Part" attachments. Well, the picture is not uploading, but I described the problem.
Has anyone heard of this bad behavior, and can anyone think of a way to debug it or help me to help you know what is wrong?
(This adds to my frustration of having a painful afternoon importing my outlook pst file because, astonishingly, thunderbird always *crashes* when trying to import outlook - which seems silly given that outlook and thunderbird are both premier pieces of software and imho thunderbird should be very well debugged by now for operations like that).
All Replies (8)
Here's is the pic I wanted to post showing the largely empty content with annoying "Attached Message Part" attachment when I simply wanted to forward a simple message.
In TB 68, html and text attachments aren't displayed inline by default. Double-click (toggle) the preference mail.inline_attachments.text to true in Config. editor (Options/Advanced/General).
For importing from Outlook, see this topic:
Thank you very much for the reply!
Yeah, mailstore home was what I used, but it was a bit clunky.
Re inline, sadly, that did not fix it; I now have (mail.inline_attachments and) mail.inline_attachments.text at true and still the same behavior.
On one of my computers, the preference is the default, false, but forwarding inline shows the original html message inline, and attachments to the original are attached, with no additional 'Part' items. I think there are probably messages that have some kind of formatting that prevents TB from showing it inline in forwards, so it's attached as in your example.
I may have to look at the source code, only, it wasn't super obvious at first glance where even to go, there.
I would compare the source (Ctrl+U) of a message that forwards properly with one that doesn't. Look at the User-Agent header for the email program.
That is a good idea; when I started to do that the messages are typically kinda long so I didn't continue, but it's probably worth finding the smallest two messages I can and comparing them. (I was speaking of the thunderbird source code earlier, but as I said that wasn't a slam dunk easiness level on first glance either). You think comparing the user agent headers? Any other headers that are likely to be ones to focus on? (I'm more of a middleware C, C++, UNIX and even hardware person, not so much web/html/web services.
The important distinction is probably in the headers, such as User-Agent and Content-type. My guess is the sender used a program that doesn't compose in standard html, or copied from a word processor such as Word, which will be indicated by MSO terms in the html.