Annoying Thunderbird open attachment dialog
I like Mozilla Thunderbird, for the most part, but I hate the way it handles opening attachments.
It asks whether I want to Open with [select box with apps registered to open the file type], *OR* Save to Disk. 99% of the time, I want to do BOTH.
If I choose “Open with”, it puts the file in a temporary directory, and opens that temporary file with whatever app was selected. In this screenshot, that app is MS Word. So, I can go ahead and read the document, if that’s all I intend to do with it. As soon as I close Word, I can’t assume that the file will continue to exist, since it’s in the temporary directory. Anything in the temporary directory should be placed there with the assumption that it could be deleted at any time.
If I choose “Save to Disk”, I get a standard Windows “Save as…” type dialog (unless I specified in the options that I wanted attachments to always save in a particular folder, without asking), and it just saves it to disk.
I usually want to save it to disk, to the place where I want to keep it, AND open it in my preferred application, to read it immediately. Why do I have to choose? Does anyone know of a Thunderbird add-on that lets you both save AND open an attachment?
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February 7th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I hate this too. I posted about it on the Mozillazine forums to see if anyone there knows of an extension, so perhaps check back there in case anyone responds. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3246864
March 7th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
The Thunderbird open attachment dialog infuriates me as well. I’m fully in support of an extension that fixes this. Why must the world insist on making me angry. I don’t want to hurt anyone.
September 30th, 2008 at 4:51 am
CopyAttachmentToClipboard is an extension that handles this elegantly, except that it’s no longer maintained and also messed up opening new windows to read messages.