Dear Thunderbird, I’m smarter than you

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of log file attachments from users of D-RATS and CHIRP .  These are small text files, usually with a python stack trace at the end that provides illumination for some issue they’ve been having.  Because most of the world’s users are on Windows and Outlook, a representative portion of these come encoded as application/octet-stream.  I think Windows is the only major OS that uses filename extensions to determine the content type of a file.  As a result, Windows (and Outlook) don’t know what a .log file is, so they default to something unfortunate for text files.

Every time I get one of these in a mail from an Outlook user, Thunderbird tries to be helpful.  By “helpful” I mean “get in my way”.  Since the senders of malicious email content are always diligent about their MIME types, Thunderbird wants to make sure you only save this file, instead of attempting to execute it.  The result is that my desktop is littered with dozens of debug files that people send me, because I have to save them out somewhere.  All I really need to do is pop it open, glance at the stack trace, have my “ah ha” moment and move on.  Instead, it becomes: double-click, save, choose Desktop, save, show desktop, double-click, etc.

A friend (who recently discovered Thunderbird and the countless extensions available) recently pinged me about some new extension at the exact moment I was cursing at the screen because of the silly workflow into which I was being forced.  I came to the realization that some crafty person must have solved this for me already in the form of an extension.  So I went hunting and found the ViewSourceWith extension.  It’s technically for something completely unrelated, but it gives me the ability to define a list of editors that show up in an “Open With” submenu in the context menu of an attachment.  The result is a much less frustrating process of looking at debug logs.

Category(s): Linux

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