When Mozilla Thunderbird gives you 0 bytes attachments

.. make lemonade. Yes, that would be nice, but unfortunately we are not talking about life and lemons here.

Today a coworker had a problem with Mozilla Thunderbird: She could no longer open attachments sent to her. Saving these attachments resulted in 0 byte files.

This nearly drove me nuts:

The email source looked fine to me. When she forwarded these emails to me, I could open and save these attachments fine, so it wasn’t the emails.

Also, attachments sent to a different account in her Thunderbird worked fine. So it wasn’t Thunderbird or the virus scanner or some kind of access rights problem.

As a test, I installed a new Thunderbird Portable for her account, guess what? It could also open these attachments.

I eventually solved the problem by removing that apparently defective account from Thunderbird and adding it again. Everything started to work normal.

There are days when you just have to accept that you don’t understand why it works now and why it didn’t work before. I definitely hate it when that happens.