MacOS Spacebar Quick Look Feature With Attachments?
This is an odd one, and an hour of googling now has turned up nothing except one person on Reddit from 6 months ago with the same issue.
When I open a messasge with an attachment, either in a new window or tab, and at the bottom of the window I click the arrow to expand the list of attachments included with the email message, if I click to select one of those attachments, I would expect that pressing the spacebar would launch a Quick Look to preview the file.
I am moving over to Thunderbird from Postbox (which I should have done long ago, frankly). Postbox is Thunderbird based, and I had no problem with the quick view of attachments in Postbox. I assume there's a configuration setting or something I'm missing that's not allowing me to use quick look to preview attachments. Or, is this by design (or rather, lack thereof)?
Running Thunderbird 128.3.3esr (64-bit) on MacOS Monterey.
Thanks for any input you may have.
Todas as respostas (6)
Select the attachment, then press Enter to open the file with the associated default app. Picture and text attachments are opened automatically if View/Display Attachments Inline is enabled.
sfhowes said
Select the attachment, then press Enter to open the file with the associated default app. Picture and text attachments are opened automatically if View/Display Attachments Inline is enabled.
No, I'm not referring to saving the file or viewing it in the program associated with the file type. I'm referring to the MacOS "Quick Look" feature where you simply press the spacebar to preview the file.
The method I described opens the file from a temporary directory, at least on Windows. The file is not saved unless done so manually.
There is no such thing as a 'preview' of a message or attachment. If any part of it has been viewed, it has been opened. It's not like a video that can be partially viewed while it's downloading.
sfhowes said
The method I described opens the file from a temporary directory, at least on Windows. The file is not saved unless done so manually. There is no such thing as a 'preview' of a message or attachment. If any part of it has been viewed, it has been opened. It's not like a video that can be partially viewed while it's downloading.
Not true on MacOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Look
All you have to do with common filetypes is select it, and press the spacebar. This works in Finder, but also throughout many apps - including the other email clients I use.
braindead3xl said
sfhowes said
The method I described opens the file from a temporary directory, at least on Windows. The file is not saved unless done so manually. There is no such thing as a 'preview' of a message or attachment. If any part of it has been viewed, it has been opened. It's not like a video that can be partially viewed while it's downloading.Not true on MacOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Look
Yes true on Apple operating system. It always strikes me just how hard it is to convince Apple users that some "feature" in their chosen operating system is just not supported. Until Thunderbird has special code to actually turn the MIME encoded part of the message body into an attachment for this APPLE feature to work, there is no file for it to work with.
POSTBOX implemented such special code in 2008 or there abouts. https://www.engadget.com/2009-03-05-postbox-beta-8-solves-issues-adds-quicklook-support.html There is no Thunderbird quick look support. There is a bug requesting it https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457546
Matt said
Until Thunderbird has special code to actually turn the MIME encoded part of the message body into an attachment for this APPLE feature to work, there is no file for it to work with. POSTBOX implemented such special code in 2008 or there abouts. https://www.engadget.com/2009-03-05-postbox-beta-8-solves-issues-adds-quicklook-support.html There is no Thunderbird quick look support. There is a bug requesting it https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457546
THANK YOU, Matt! This is exactly the information I was looking for.
It seems like Thunderbird would already have the code for converting MIME types since you can already view images inline, and by virtue of the fact that it understands attachments and can save them to disk. In any case, the feature request outlines my question and want, and it appears to be a dormant request. A small hassle I'll work around.
Thanks again for the informative response.