Prevent Thunderbird from trying to display large plain text attachments

Question

I have a coworker who loves sending large plain-text tab-delimited data files by e-mail instead of our network share. The problem is that Thunderbird hangs while it renders all of that text into the message view window, making my inbox unhappy for minutes at a time.

Ideally, I'd like to disable viewing of text/plain attachments above a few K, but if necessary I'd be fine disabling viewing of all text attachments and just rely on an external viewer. There wasn't an immediately obvious way to do this in Options. Is there a way?

score 27 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 04 '16 at 18:25

27

I'd be fine disabling viewing of all text attachments

Clear View -> Display Attachments Inline

edited Jul 04 '16 at 18:25

Peter Mortensen

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answered Feb 17 '10 at 16:04

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...and I feel dumb for checking Options first but not any menus. Thanks! – UltraNurd Feb 17 '10 at 17:05
After doing this, the txt file I want to download appears to be gone. – mlissner May 06 '15 at 18:09
If @Mozilla is monitoring this (now that they have started working on Thunderbird again), it would sure be nice to have finer-grained control over which items are displayed inline. For example, 7 MB text file displayed inline, no! Images, yes. – Timothy Lee Russell Jan 31 '19 at 00:45

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 04 '16 at 18:26

1

Due to changes to the Thunderbird options dialog, Molly7244's solution does not work any longer.

Alternatively you can edit the Thunderbird configuration under menu Settings -> General -> Edit config and set mail.inline_attachment to false.

edited Jul 04 '16 at 18:26

Peter Mortensen

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answered Sep 24 '15 at 09:25

Andreas

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That may have been true when this was written, but as of today, with Thunderbird 45.7.0, @Molly7244's answer works fine. Perhaps the answer was corrected. – Lambart Mar 03 '17 at 18:43

Prevent Thunderbird from trying to display large plain text attachments

2 Answers2