WARNING: do not remove attachments from emails if you use Thunderbird 52.9.0
 

This is my advice after having read the message from Klaus Hartnegg titled Don't upgrade to Thunderbird 52.9.

Thunderbird 52.9.0 is currently shipped in at least Slackware 14.2 and -current, also Slint 14.2 and 14.2.1, and probably proposed by derivatives, at least those that don't ship their own packages.

I just made a quick test sending an email to myself as an attachment and removing the attachment from the received email, without any damage, but YMMV.

I suggest to just continue using 52.9.0 but avoid removing attachments from important emails until Thunderbird be upgraded to 52.9.1, just in case.

Thanks for the heads-up, Didier! I read your post and the link that you included. I am curious. There's the reference to "damage" in e-mails. What does that mean? Does the e-mail become corrupted, unreadable?

I really don't know. I assume that the answer can be found in some of the Thunderbid channels, but honestly didn't check. tb-entreprise being a very low traffic list with a mostly corporate audience, I just assume that Klaus doesn't speak there lightly.

Looking at the bug report, it appears that the message body is re-encoded into UTF-8, but then the wrong encoding is listed in the headers. The data is not damaged in a way that would prevent ever retrieving it again.

There's an upstream patch available for this. No idea how quickly we'll see 52.9.1 though - perhaps it's better to just wait.

Then I assume that iconv could be used to restore the wrongly encoded body so yes, we can wait.

Thank you for the warning, Didier!

Thunderbird 52.9.1 is available and it fixes this bug.

Releases notes

I mark this thread as [SOLVED]

Thanks for the heads-up, Didier. :)