Comment 8 for bug 84880

I have a possible solution - look at mimeTypes.rdf (see below)

I can confirm this problem, and while trying to find a fix, I came across this bug. There are also numerous logged on bugzilla.mozilla.org.

For the record: On Kubuntu Hardy, running under KDE3, Firefox version Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071717 Firefox/3.0.1. Plenty of extensions none of which I think are relevant.

Uploading PDF attachments to PHPList (phplist.com), they come through as application/binary. Konqueror does it fine. This is a serious problem, because phplist does not provide a way to change the mime type of an attachment (except a direct database edit, ouch). I can't just use Konqueror because that doesn't support FCKEditor for rich text editing.

"file" command reports PDF document, version 1.3, /etc/mime.types and all that look ok.

HOWEVER I had ported my firefox profile across from a Windows machine, I don't know what happened to that there, but in my profile directory, mimeTypes.rdf contained this gem:

      <RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:application/binary"
                   NC:value="application/binary"
                   NC:editable="true"
                   NC:fileExtensions="pdf"
                   NC:description="Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Document">

I've edited this to instead say:

     <RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:application/pdf"
                   NC:value="application/pdf"
                   NC:editable="true"
                   NC:fileExtensions="pdf"
                   NC:description="Adobe Acrobat Document">

Now file upload works.