Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Thunderbird IMAP and attachment issues

We setup the scanner portion of our office printer/scanner/fax machine today. Upon scanning, the printer/scanner/fax images the document, saves it as a PDF and emails out to whomever you picked to send the image to. I received the PDF in my email in my client of choice, Thunderbird (version 2.0.0.9 (20071031) using IMAP) and when attempting to open it, received the following error message from Adobe Acrobat reader:

"The was an error opening this document. The file is damaged and could not be repaired"

I downloaded an alternative Win32 PDF reader, Foxit Reader, and gave that a shot, only to receive a similar message. I contacted a colleague who also received the test message to find out she was able to open the PDF with no issues using Outlook. With that info, I went to my webmail client and was able to open the PDF file with no issue. So the problem was with Thunderbird.

After a quick Google search, I found several postings from other folks with a similar predicament, mostly from attempting to hook Thunderbird to the new released Gmail IMAP ports. I came across the following nugget of information which immediately corrected my problem....

Original source thread

In the "about:config" section of Thunderbird (Tools > Options > Advanced > Config Editor) look for the "mail.imap.fetch_by_chunks" and " mail.server.default.fetch_by_chunks" values and set them to "False".

Mozillazine gives some more information about what this value actually does here

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with you about these. Well someday Ill create a blog to compete you! lolz.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this... it appears to have fixed my problem. :)

Anonymous said...

Ethan Jones,

Thanks so much for a great post. You solved a big big problem for me.

I owe you big time!

Thx Jim Seifert