Thunderbird, Dovecot & IMAP: Corrupt & Missing Attachments
One issue that bugs the hell out of me is IMAP implementations. I love IMAP and can barely understand why people use POP3 when IMAP is an available option, but people just can’t seem to agree on how to implement the standard. I’ve recently been suffering at the hands of Thunderbird’s IMAP implementation. It may be the best available MUA, but it still has its problems; especially where IMAP is concerned.
The issue I’ve been dealing with is that, ever since upgrading the e-mail server and an upgrade to Dovecot, Thunderbird has been playing havoc with attachments accessed via IMAP. Some have been corrupted, some have been nothing but empty files. I would love to blame Dovecot for this, but this one is Thunderbird’s fault.
In the same way that Thunderbird downloads just the message headers until you specify a message you want to view, it only downloads certain parts of a MIME message that you have opened until you choose to request the other parts. In my case, it hasn’t been doing the job properly and isn’t pulling the extra MIME parts when they are asked for.
It’s still not clear precisely what Thunderbird is actually doing and what it intends to do, but the simple solution is to modify the config and tell it to stop trying to be clever.
about:config
mail.imap.fetch_by_chunks false
mail.server.default.fetch_by_chunks falsemail.imap.mime_parts_on_demand false
mail.server.default.parts_on_demand false
This has proven successful on both Slackware and WindowsXP.
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