saved mails from "Sent" folder are not recognized as e-mails

[Wouter Hanegraaff]

Binary package hint: mozilla-thunderbird

If I save an e-mail from my sent box to a file, it will have a .eml extension. However, if I try to open the file, it will open with the default text editor. In the file browser, the file type is "plain text", while the extension is .eml .

The reason is that when saving an e-mail from the sent folder, the "From " header is stripped. Without this header, nautilus doesn't recognise the file as an e-mail and the wrong application is used for opening the saved mail.

This could be solved by making thunderbird not strip the "From " header, or by having nautilus recognise files starting with "Message-ID: " headers as e-mail files.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Is this still an issue for you? We are trying to trying sort out the older Mozilla issues and would like to know if this still happens.

[Wouter Hanegraaff (wouter-openoffice)]

John Vivirito schreef:
> Is this still an issue for you? We are trying to trying sort out the
> older Mozilla issues and would like to know if this still happens.

Yes, this still happens in thunderbird 1.5.0.10-0ubuntu2, but also in
all earlier versions.

Wouter

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

can you check thunderbird 2.0 as well?

[Wouter Hanegraaff (wouter-openoffice)]

Still present in 2.0.

Why is this bug still marked incomplete?
Is it even an mozilla bug, or should it be reassigned to nautilus (or whatever package makes up the rules for deciding the file type of .eml files when you doubleclick on them in Nautilus)?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

I guess .eml files should be automatically recognized by shared-mime-info (thus by nautilus) as emails to open with the default mail application, even when their header is missing (since there is no ambiguity about the contents of the file). One may want to remove the "From" header from the file.

In Gutsy, the "From" header is saved by Thunderbird, so the standard saved mails are correctly recognized. *Though, Thunderbird is not proposed to open .eml files*. Maybe it should add a file in /usr/share/mime to tell shared-mime-info it can open these files. Or is this the job of s-m-i or of any other package?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

I should have precised: Thunderbird in Gutsy correctly saves mails from inbox, but not from sentbox (as said in the description). There are two parts in this bug.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

1) When you save emails from Thunderbird's 'sentbox', they're not recognized as emails but as text/plain. But messages saved in Thunderbird from any other folder than 'sent' are seen as message/rfc822, which is IMHO the correct MIME type.

Is that a Thunderbird bug or a too strict pattern in fd.o.xml?

2) Evolution saved messages always appear as application/mbox.

Regarding the message saved from 'sentbox' in TB and an Evo message, the difference is apparently that Evolution adds a 'From' and date line at the top of the file, and it appears as application/mbox.

Same question: is it normal that the Evo messages are detected as mailboxes and not messages? To me finally only the TB messages not from 'sentbox' look correct, or properly detected.

Thanks

See attached files for complete reference (tags from Evolution are here because I read them first with Evo, not because I saved them with it).
Here's the structure of the headers:
* message-rfc822 file from TB:
Received:
Date:
From:
User-Agent:
MIME-Version: 1.0
To:
Subject:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

* application/mbox file from Evo:
From <email address hidden> Fri Apr 25 22:12:15 2008
Subject:
From:
To:
Cc:
In-Reply-To:
References:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Evolution 2.22.1
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:12:15 +0200
X-Evolution-Format: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

* text/plain file from TB:
Subject:
From:
To:
Cc:
In-Reply-To:
References:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Message-Id:
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Evolution 2.22.1
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:12:15 +0200
X-Evolution-Format: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Created an attachment (id=16325)
message-rfc822 from TB, correct

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Created an attachment (id=16326)
text-plain from TB sentbox, not correct

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Created an attachment (id=16327)
application-mbox from Evo, maybe not correct

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

I reported this upstream, need to see whether this comes from Thunderbird or from the MIME database. Evolution has trouble too.

[Wouter Hanegraaff (wouter-openoffice)]

Milan schreef:
> I reported this upstream, need to see whether this comes from
> Thunderbird or from the MIME database. Evolution has trouble too.

I think it's a mime issue; e-mails you save from your sent-box don't
start with a "Return-Path: " or a "From " header, and are recognised as
text files.

Wouter

[Bastien Nocera (hadess-deactivatedaccount)]

Mbox files start with:
"From "
Eg. your evolution message:
From <email address hidden> Fri Apr 25 22:12:15 2008

The message from the sentbox not matching is fixed in CVS.

* freedesktop.org.xml.in: Add "Subject: " as a match
for message/rfc822 mime-types
* tests/evo.msg: Remove, it was unused
* tests/list:
* tests/evolution.eml:
* tests/tb-from-sentbox.eml:
* tests/tb-saved.eml: Add some message test cases

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the issue has been fixed upstream now

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

The fix has since been released in the form of a new upstream shared-mime-info release.