I exclusively use Thunderbird in POP mail mode. I'm mainly concerned with attachments sent from mail forms on my own websites, sent to email addresses which are also from my own domain. So I have pretty good control over most variables. That is, in my PHP code for my mail forms I can set a limit on attachment sizes, and gracefully warn a visitor when a file is too big. I also have control over the quota on the email addresses my forms ultimately send to, and usually they are set to unlimited. However, in the Thunderbird settings for the target email, I DO have the "Disk Space" limit setting turned on, set to its default, which is "do not download" messages larger than 1000 KB.
In the past it this would work well. If a message came with an attachment greater than 1 meg, I would normally see the message, along with an added notice from Thunderbird, that the message was truncated due to its length and inviting me to "click" to download the rest of the message. If I did click, the message would typically vanish from the inbox, and then re-appear complete, with the original message plus attachment.
Well that behavior seems to have changed, and I'm not sure if this is a new Mozilla bug, or something else I'm missing in my php mail form. My forms and code have not changed in a long time so I'm hesitant to consider anything wrong there. But the behavior now is that mail that is too big displays as before, with the note telling me it is truncated, and inviting me to download the rest. When I do, the original mail disappears as before, and then reappears in the inbox. But now the message is completely empty, other than the "From" field and time stamp. Actually, even the headers seem to be gone, when I switch my view to "all headers".
Fortunately, in my php forms I store attachment files in a private folder at the server, and I never delete (unlink) them to safeguard against such email foul ups. I can always FTP into my file tree and delete things I'm sure I got. But the last time this happened some important details were in the body of the original message, which was sent from a "noReply" address, and so now that information is completely lost!
For now I've turned off the "save disk space" setting in the thunderbird email account, until I understand better what is going on. Is it possible that the normal action when I 'click to download' a truncated message just won't work with a typical PHP email form? I'm not sure why as it always did before. Is it possible Thunderbird has a new bug and s wrongly (in my opinion) removing mail from the server, before giving me a chance to complete the large download?
This doesn't happen often but it is annoying, an if its likely caused by something I'm doing wrong I'd like to correct it. Thanks for any thoughts.
