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masterofamn

Member

Registered: 2012-05-09

Posts: 28

[SOLVED] Thunderbird does not open plain txt attachements

Hi,

I am experiencing an annoying behavior of Thunderbird (141.0) running on Plasma 6.4.3:

When I try to open a plain txt attachment of a mail, hundreds of 0 byte tmp files named <randomstring>.txt.part get created on my desktop. This only stops when I eventually kill Thunderbird. Opening PDF or png files on the other hand is not an issue, no tmp files appear in this case and the file just opens in the designated default application.

I already tried to re-define the default application (kate in my case) for txt files, but this does not help. Even if I delete the file-type association altogether it does not ask me what to do with the file but the tmp-files appear after clicking on the attachment.

Any hints on what the problem is or how to fix this?

Thanks in  advance

MoA

Last edited by masterofamn (2025-07-31 15:18:29)

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 14,840

Re: [SOLVED] Thunderbird does not open plain txt attachements

Thunderbird has its own list of applications under settings > general > files & attachments .

What is 'Plain Text Document' associated with and does the behaviour change if you set it to "Always Ask" ?

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masterofamn

Member

Registered: 2012-05-09

Posts: 28

Re: [SOLVED] Thunderbird does not open plain txt attachements

Thanks for the reply.

I was about to simply reply its not even listed in this Files&Attachments list, but now I realized something seems to be broken with this list in the first place:

1. It contains two entries for Word and Excel documents each, plus a fifth  one for "Application log" - that's all. The last is "empty" under "Action" and when I set it to "Use Kate (default", this setting is not saved, i.e. when I close the settings-tab and reopen, the setting is blank again.

2. This sounds stupid and totally random, but when I was playing around with this "Application Log" setting trying to make it stick to Kate while typing this post, once "Plain text" was in the list as fifth element instead of "Application Log"? I could set this to "Kate (default)" and now the text-files open in the editor as normal - but the entry is gone again and Application Log is shown instead.

So on the one hand my initial problem is kinda solved, but on the other hand this list seems to be broken in my case. Anyone knows where this info is stored for Thunderbird? It seems to be linked to the system-wide file-type settings, but I can't find anything about it in the profile folder....

Solved: All this was caused by handlers.json in the profile dir. This got corrupted somehow, so that I could not re-define handlers and they were messed up, so that thunderbird itself tried to open the plain text files. Fixed by deleting handlers.json and let thunderbird re-build it.

Last edited by masterofamn (2025-07-31 15:18:17)