This body part will be downloaded on demand

Submitted by Jamie Neil on December 19, 2006 - 12:09pm

There seems to be some problem in the way the Thunderbird email client handles certain kinds of attachment which means the message "This body part will be downloaded on demand" is displayed when you try to view a message. We've seen this problem both with VCard attachments (.vcf) generated by Thunderbird when combined with other attachment types, and with certain attachments sent from Microsoft Outlook.

If you use POP3 to fetch your email then you can just download the full message and it displays with no further problems, but if you use IMAP (which many of our customers do) then there doesn't seem to be a way of downloading the body part of the message.

Luckily there is a simple workaround which I found at mozillaZine. The solution is to tick the "Display Attachments Inline" in the View menu, which causes Thunderbird to download the entire message along with all the attachments and display the attachments that are viewable (like images) in sections below the main message body.

Easy when you know how :).

Subjects:

fix and repair

Comments

Thank you! I've been getting

comment - November 9, 2007 - 9:11pm

Thank you! I've been getting emails from my clients and wondering why there's no message - only attachments. Yay for open source.

thanks for the info helped

comment - March 27, 2008 - 3:51pm

thanks for the info helped out alot

Did not work for me

comment - May 20, 2008 - 12:43pm

Did not work for me

Thanks it works also for me.

comment - June 6, 2008 - 12:01pm

Thanks it works also for me.

Thanks a lot for this

comment - February 20, 2009 - 8:58am

Thanks a lot for this information :)

The thing nobody seems

comment - April 3, 2009 - 6:49am

The thing nobody seems willing to acknowledge is, it isn't JUST the attachments that aren't being displayed, it's the message body! Yes, this will make the obnoxious "I ain't gonna do it" attitude go away, but what if I want to NOT display ATTACHMENTS but DO want to display the text of the message? Thank you for providing this Service! The world appreciates you, if silently.

Thanks!

comment - October 28, 2009 - 9:00am

Thanks!

Thanks, it helped me!

comment - November 10, 2009 - 12:19pm

Thanks, it helped me!

comment - December 15, 2009 - 7:16pm

Thanks, it helped me!

Totally agree with above,

comment - March 7, 2010 - 1:39am

Totally agree with above, but worse I DO have that attribute set and my attachments are still not always displayable. And some that could be accessed at first show up as no longer accessible days or weeks later.