How to load all the message up to a selected size over POP
I want Thunderbird to load all of a message up to a specified size over a POP connection.
The only option I can find is to set a maximum size, but this results in only the first few lines being downloaded if the email is over the specified maximum so if the email has large attachments I have to load the entire, sometimes huge, email just to read the text portion which is usually the first part. Since I am on a slow connection, with limited data this is not attractive.
Aquamail for Android does just load up to a specified limit, so it can be done.
All Replies (3)
This varies from your last thread how?
Original Thread https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1052126
As far as I am aware your chasing something that Thunderbird does not do.
It is the same problem. I was hoping there might now be a solution within Thunderbird. It seems that there is not so I wish to request that it be considered as additional functionality which should be added to Thunderbird. I can not see what problem it could cause. The current way of just not loading anything at all if the total message exceeds the limit seems really clumsy. I like Thunderbird in most respects, but this shortcoming is really annoying to me, and I am sure to others on limited connections..
Another approach would be to see if your email provider offers any settings on the server to help. Maybe it can identify attachments and withhold them, or just send you the plain text portion of the message. But as Matt says, it's all just a text stream and has no intrinsic breaks until it is parsed by a mail user agent - i.e. an email client.
Sending the first x kilobytes has a logical issue in that if it's part way through an image block or a mime part when it reaches the value x then the message, so far as it has been downloaded, is incomplete and leads to the issues Gnospen discussed. And the partial picture, if that's what it is, may be un-renderable,
It's my experience that email clients on phones do some non-standard things, to expedite their use on a device with expensive bandwidth and limited local storage. I'm intrigued by how they manage to separate images and offer them as separate downloads. It's not clear to me how regular email protocols can implement this.