download more than the first few lines when message size is exceeded
I have set a maximum message size to prevent really large attachments from being downloaded over my slow connection. When an email which exceeds this limit is received I only see the first few lines of the message and have to download the whole, including attachments, in order to read the text. I do not want to turn off automatic download of all attachments because many are small and no problem. Is there a setting which controls the number of lines downloaded when message size is exceeded, or even better, to download all except the attachments when this happens?
All Replies (6)
An email is a stream of text, it does not become mail and attachment until a web site or mail client actually converts is to something human readable.
So whatever Kb you set to download is going to the the first part of the message. Most email clients send a text version of the email as well as the glorified HTML one. Try viewing the mail as text as this version where supplied comes before the HTML one. So you probably have the whole message in text. Note Business rarely use text versions, but try it.
View menu (alt+V) > Message body as > plain text
Alternatively try setting the KB to 100 or 120 most mail without attachments, including commercial mail is smaller than that.
Matt,
You seem to misunderstand my problem. When the entire email exceeds the limit only a few lines are downloaded from the POP server. It would be great if it actually loaded up to the limit set, but that is not what Thunderbird does.
This is what it displays in a typical case where the limit was set to 2MB and the email was 2.3MB according to Thunderbird. As you can see it offers to download the entire email if you choose.
Setting the limit to 100KB would achieve nothing different. You still have to download the whole thing to read the bit that comers first.
============================================
Our last port of call...We arrived at dawn and the sunrise was very nice. St Thomas has a beautiful harbor, with lots of other islands nearby.
Truncated!This message exceeded the Maximum Message Size set in Account Settings, so we have only downloaded the first few lines from the mail server.
Download the rest of the message.
===============================================
Misunderstand NO.
I looked through my mail before I replied to you. There is basically nothing over 120kb that does not have attachments. I assume my mail is mostly "Normal"
Most of my mail is less than 20Kb.
What is to misunderstand there?
Oh I suppose they start their emails with the picture and then type under it.
Did you even try to see if there was a text version?
I agree that most email without attachments is quite small. However many attachments are also not large and I want to receive them without having to do extra steps.
As I said above, the problem is that Thunderbird does not load any of the message if it detects that the total is larger than the set maximum. It just downloads the headers followed by the first two lines of the message and displays a message to that effect.
Is there a setting which allows download of all the data up to the limit?
I tried plain text, but made no difference. It still only downloads the headers followed by the first two lines of the message text.
The email program on my Android tablet loads it all up to the limit, so it can be done.
Interesting. You have it set up as a pop-account on your pc. If you download a part should it be marked as downloaded or should it start downloading again at the next login (up to limit, again)? As a failed download? Fetching only headers might ease the strain on your network.
It is a POP account. This is the message which appears after the first 2 or 3 lines.
