Well, it\u2019s over. I think I have the damn thing wrestled to the mat. The big time-sink this time was peculiar: When I tried to save out an email attachment from inside Thunderbird\u2026nothing happened. I tried again. Same thing. I tried another email attachment, as a test. Same thing. I tried yet another attachment, a silly picture of a kid in a very clever Halloween costume. And\u2026it was saved to where I save things, the Downloads library.<\/p>\n
Huh? It drove me nuts. Some things were saved but most weren\u2019t. I tried to save them to different folders, like Documents and others, no good. I searched online and found a number of suggestions when Thunderbird won\u2019t save an attachment file to disk. None of them seemed pertinent. Then someone suggested looking at the AV program. I\u2019ve used Windows Defender for years with good results, and it never gave me grief about saving attachments.<\/p>\n
Then it hit me: McAfee AV had been pre-installed on the new Dell machine. I didn\u2019t register it and didn\u2019t think it was functioning. But when I uninstalled McAfee, alluvasudden Thunderbird saved out attachments without a fight, right where I wanted them.<\/p>\n
Bingo. My guess at this point is that the picture of the kid in a costume was a .jpg, whereas all the others were Word .docx files. You can insert macros into Word documents, and I think that\u2019s what McAfee was worried about. I looked at all the .docx files I tried to save out, and none contained macros.<\/p>\n
And with that, the war was over. Oh, I expect to run into an occasional Win 11 setting or somesuch that goes against logic. So far so good.<\/p>\n
Yes, I know, attachments can contain malware. C\u2019mon, I\u2019ve been in this business for a long, long time. I\u2019ve disabled macros in Office documents. I don\u2019t save or open attachments from people I don\u2019t know until I can scan them or in some other way figure out what they are. Most of the time I just delete them.<\/p>\n
Again, because I spend nearly all my time in Windows looking at software other than Windows, the switch really isn\u2019t that radical. So I\u2019m on to other things, like a new release of FreePascal from Square One<\/em>, which I\u2019ll be writing up in the next day or two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, it\u2019s over. I think I have the damn thing wrestled to the mat. The big time-sink this time was peculiar: When I tried to save out an email attachment from inside Thunderbird\u2026nothing happened. I tried again. Same thing. I tried another email attachment, as a test. Same thing. I tried yet another attachment, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5494"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5495,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5494\/revisions\/5495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}