thunderbird insists on using gimp for pdf

English Applications
1

Hi folks,

I run openSUSE 11.1 and thunderbird always opens pdf attachments with gimp. When you double-click the attachment, you can manually choose the application, but the checkbox to make this choice permanent is inactive.
I also removed the mimetypes file and looked into “view and edit actions”, but there is no entry for pdfs and no possibility to add entries.
However, for kde, I set kpdf as standard viewer without a problem. Any ideas? Thanks

2

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/394

HTH
Uwe

3

Thanks, this is a solution, but honestly a not so satisfying one. You still have to choose manually which program to use. As far as I have seen, you cannot tell this plugin how to handle different file extensions.
I would like to have the following: extension pdf should be opened with kpdf, extension jpeg should be opened with gimp, etc.

4

I’ve got the same problem in opera, so this must be a suse thing… haven’t figured it out yet

5

Works fine with the stock Thunderbird from openSUSE for me, I have acroread open PDF attachments, and gqview open PNG attachments. Since you don’t already have the PDF type defined, according to the article below, you have to open an email with such an attachment type and then you can change the default action. Otherwise install the addon mentioned in the article to be able to add new types without an existing email.

Actions for attachment file types - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

6

Okay, I resolved the issue.
AdmiralFubar, no, it’s definitely not a suse thing, but thunderbird behavior.
ken_yap, my point was that I had such an email and it was not possible to change the default behavior.
The behavior is not very transparent in my view, but for some senders which thunderbird believes to be suspect for some reason, you cannot change the default open behavior. However, if you receive the pdf from a trustworthy mail address, you can just double-click it and change the default action for this file type. This behavior then also holds for the non-trustworthy mail. So I don’t quite understand this security concept.

7

I thought it was counterintuitive not to be able to add new types without having an attachment of that type already, which is why I suppose somebody created an add-on editor for this.