There needs to be a way to see the MIME type and size of an attachment without attempting to open it. The attachment list box shows only a "name", which is useless in predicting what will happen if I attempt to "open" it. There's no way for me to look and see what is the mime type of the attachment, or its size, before opening it. The only info I have is the useless name. I may not want to open the attachment if it is a PDF file, or some movie file, even if it is "safe" to do so. But with N6 the attachment list lacks any reasonable basis upon which to make such a decision. Communicator used to show attachments as links in little tables in line. The right side of the table included MIME information such as MIME type, and other relevant info. So, it was possible to know at a glance whether there was any risk in opening the attachment or not, and to predict what the attachment was likely to do (e.g. to start real player or a PDF viewer).

With Communicator, I never feared any unexpected behavior from opening an attachment because I could predict what would happen. With N6 I cannot. I feel no safer opening attachments with N6 than with MSOE. Both N6 and MSOE claim to have features that will protect me by putting up dialogs before doing "dangerous" things. I prefer to trust my own judgement about that, based on MIME type, than to rely on same bits in a registry somewhere that might not be what I expect them to be.

No action in 6½ years, not blocked by another bug. Setting HW/OS to All/All. QAContact is not reading bugmail, resetting. AFAICT, this bug is still valid. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9pre) Gecko/2008052801 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre

Maybe the problem is that this bug is filed against SeaMonkey instead of against core/mail or Thunderbird. As a SM user, I never know when a mail problem is rightfully filed against SM or against core/mail or against TB. I expect the mail or SM experts to help sort that out. I wish we could have ONE product against which ALL mail bugs were filed, regardless of SM, TB, or what program it's bundled in.

The problem is that most of the front-end code is forked. So Thunderbird has this problem as well, but it's very likely to be fixed separately. :-/

I spun off a more general Thunderbird version: bug 436555.

The attached small screen shot shows an email message header pane with the attachments pane present. The attachment pane says the attachment is a file named "scan0001.jpg". But we know that email attackers who try to infect systems often put false file names on the files they send. Sending executables or other dangerous types disguised as images is very common. SM decides what to do with the attachment based on the MIME content type, if I'm not mistaken, but that information is not present in this display. This RFE says: give me enough info that I can tell what's really going to happen with the attachment if I "open" it.