Sending a attachment with a long filename does not work correctly!

[Jelle de Jong]

Binary package hint: mozilla-thunderbird

Sending a attachment with a long filename does not work, and goes wrong when sending to squirrel mail, outlook express, horde and maybe other clients.

Hello, I have been working on a big issue with sending email form Thunderbird to:
squirrel mail, outlook express, horde and maybe other clients.

While I send a file with a long filename the attachment will not arrive successful by the recipient the filename will be lost but mine type will be correct. In outlook express this mean the file will be renamed to something like D234234.dat a binary file.

I have attachment two documents they are the same but one with a short name and one with a long name. If you send those with Thunderbird to a other client it will go wrong. But in Thunderbird everything seems to go fine.

Also when I sent the same files with squirrel mail, horde, claws mail or outlook the file will be received successful by the recipient.

I have to mail a lot to persons with outlook clients and I have been pulling my hair out why they did not receive my mail attachments correctly.

This tells me there is a probably a big problem with the way the standards are implemented in Thunderbird.

Please fix this bug, so I can safely send mail again to the rest of the not Thunderbird client using world. :-D

[Jelle de Jong (jelledejong)]

send both the long and short filename and see how it goes wrong

[Jelle de Jong (jelledejong)]

What more information is needed? send the short filename and long filename attachment in a email to some outlook squirrel mail, outlook express, horde and see how it goes wrong.
The long filename attachment will be meshed up and look like a peace of binary crap. I still got very big problems with this bug,
If you need more info please contact me.

[John Vivirito (gnomefreak)]

Jelle when we need more info we will let you know. all bugs that are reported on mozilla products we mark as needs info doesnt mean we need it right than and there.

[Alex Latchford (alex.latchford)]

Hello Jelle,

I have sent the attachment you added here (the long titled one), to a hotmail account, seems to show up fine. I am as a result going to set the mt-needtester tag to this report so we can test it on lots of different clients.

Thanks, Alex.

[Bas van den Bogaert (bas-vandenbogaert)]

I can confirm Jelle's experience.
Small (190 kb) and innocent pdf files with quite long file names (of the order of 70 characters) lost their original name and extension and were unreadible if sent to Outlook.
The problem remained when the name was reduced to 60 characters but was resolved once the file name was reduced to 44 characters.
I am using Thunderbird version 1.5.0.10 (20070221).
My colleague, who is still working with version 1.0.2 (20050317), does not have the problem.

[Tóth Péter Barnabás (tpbarnabas)]

Same problem here, with filenames containing accents. Appeared after upgrade to Feisty.

Solution is to change a Thunderbird setting:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Attachments_renamed

[Bas van den Bogaert (bas-vandenbogaert)]

That setting solves the problem in the tests I did.

Thanks for sharing the solution.

Bas

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

According to:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Attachments_renamed
Fix was released in Thunderbird 2. Thunderbird 1.5 is no longer receiving support. If you experience this in Thunderbird 2 or later, please change status to New and let us know your current version.