Does anyone else have this problem? I find that if I click on an attachment of any type in an email in Thunderbird it offers to open it with “System Handler”. If I click the drop down and select “Other…” I get two choices, “Help” and “Thunderbird”. Not much use when the attachment is an mp4 or csv file for instance. The only way I can access the attachment is to save it somewhere then open it with the appropriate application. Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks, Ian
probably you run Thunderbird in a flatpak. So your Thunderbird does not see other applications installed on your system, it can see only apps inside its container.
I don’t know what can be a solution for this. May it is worthy to open an issue in repository for this flatpak.
Thanks @ph0zzy, you are right, I did install it as a flatpak from flathub, so I assumed it would all work. Opening an attachment is pretty basic functionality so I’m surprised that it doesn’t work, and even more surprised that nobody else seems to have the same problem! I was assuming it must be something to do with my installation, and that maybe I just need to tweak something or install a library or something. But having a look in the issues for TB may be a good start.
Thanks, Ian
I have the same issue. Always need to download the attachments via webmail to open it. 
Well, a new version of Thunderbird was installed yesterday. Now I can’t save attachments from TB at all. It used to work (saving, that is) but now it doesn’t. It looks like it works, but nothing is actually saved. Now I have to use @jlelse 's trick, download using webmail.
An alternative fix, install Evolution. It works fine.
I prefer Thunderbird, but if it doesn’t work, wadddya gonna do?..
Three months later this problem still persists. I guess I’ll just hurry up and wait.
It is probably a Mozilla issue more than a fedora/silverblue one. I am uncertain of the packager of the flatpak, is it mozilla or another? It could just be lagging behind with respect to this issue. Did you file a bug against the Thunderbird Flatpak? It may prompt them to give it more attention.
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Thanks for the reply @jakfrost. I have been on the thunderbird forums re this issue and didn’t get much help. I didn’t file a bug as it is only a problem with SB afaik, as it works fine on every other distro I’ve tried. Having said that I’ve never installed the flatpak on any other distro, so I could be talking out of my fundamental orifice. I didn’t know I could file a bug against the Thunderbird Flatpak. Is this the correct place to do it? Issues · flathub/org.mozilla.Thunderbird · GitHub
Thanks,
That would seem to be the correct place to file a bug (issue). Good luck
@jakfrost I had a shot at creating an issue and found that it is already pretty well covered, and goes back to 2018. The consensus seems be that it’s a Thunderbird issue, not a Flatpak one. In any case it seems to be in hand.
Thanks for your help.
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You are welcome… \o/ I hope you don’t mind if I tag this as solved.
Does anyone have a workaround for this in 2021? Not being able to open attachments is a real PITA.
If you read the comments here you can see the issue is with Mozilla Thunderbird and is tracked at their Github issue tracking mentioned in the comments above. You should jog the teams memory there to try to get more attention on it.
You don’t need to have Thunderbird “installed”, neither via dnf or rpm-ostree, nor flatpak. Download the executable version from the official website (Thunderbird Release Notes — Thunderbird), unpack it in a directory of your choice and start it from there. Thunderbird autoupdates itself so you will always have the latest.
If it does not detect your previous profile with all your settings and emails (because it was in another location - depending how it was installed), it will create a new default empty profile in ~/.thunderbird. So you just need to move your previous profile to this location and edit profiles.ini to make it default. But in most cases it is OK and you don’t need to do that.
In fact I am using both Firefox and Thunderbird Beta as portable apps for years now, across many OS-s (first under Windows XP, then Windows 7, then I moved the profile to Linux Mint, then OpenSUSE, then Ubuntu, then Parabola Linux, then Arch, then Debian, an now Silverblue. It is still the same profile just new executable code. (I don’t use extensions, only the official included calendar, so I don’t have issues with the Beta, except that in the last 3-4 versions there are some UI issues with the Chat).
I suggest to try to use as many apps in this way, preferably having them all on a dedicated partition, as it allows you to change the OS in no time.
I am not mentioning anything specific related to the problem at hand, but with such a setup I take all my configuration with me, so I already have all the attachments registered to open with a specific usually portable application and they are usually set as ~/Portable/appName/appExecutable