Is there a way to preserve the original date when saving attachment from email archive?

[Herb@UK]

When I save attachments from my Thunderbird email archive to a local
folder, the saved files are assigned the current date and time, which I
find counterintuitive and isn't what I want, because it is a nuisance in
situations where one wants to create an "attachment trail" of material
sent to, say, a particular client over a period of time, if you see what
I mean.

I'm not sure whether the behaviour I described is a generic Windows
"feature" or a Thunderbird "feature", and whether there is a way to
change it?

I hope I managed to explain the issue reasonably transparently – if not,
please shout 🙂

Thank you.

Herbert Eppel
www.HETranslations.uk

[Nobody]

>please shout ?

>
>Thank you.
>
>Herbert Eppel
>www.HETranslations.uk

There used to be an add-on "AttachmentExtractor" which did the job,
but it hasn't been updated in years...

If the number of files involved isn't huge, slip the date in the form
of yyyymmdd in front of the name when the dialog(ue) box comes up and
they'll be in sequence. Should you have multiples per day, add
numerics at the end, though remember to add zero first in those up to
nine if there are more than ten being saved.

[Wolf K]

Whenever you save to a Windows folder, the file is date-stamped. You can
add the date received in the file name when you use Save As to save the
attachment (When I do this, is use "yyyymmdd" to make sorting easy).

Other relevant dates may be in the file's metadata. Windows can display
the metadata. You can find Dates as follows:

a) Open an Explorer window, and set View to details
b) Right click on an empty spot in the column title bar. In the pane
that opens, click on More.
c) Scroll down the alphabetical listing to the Date... lines, and click
on the boxes.
d) Close the pane, and look at the Date columns. If the attachment has
the appropriate metadata, you will find the date the attachment was
first created. Other dates may also be of interest.

There may be an extension that adds the Dtes sent and date received to
the attachment. Good hunting!

Best,

--
Wolf K
kirkwood40.blogspot.com
You are who you intend to be. (Kurt Vonnegut)

[Steve]

See https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/attachmentextractor-continued/ for TB 60.

[Nobody]

Hmmm... T'bird's add-on search comes up with v1.3.5.1... which doesn't
work for me (Win 10 T'bird 60.8.0).

Your link for '-continued' leads to an .xpi file of v1.0b1...
supposedly works for T'bird v60... but for the life of me, I can't get
it to respond though it did install.

[😉 Good Guy 😉]

Probably some Add-Ons might be able to do this for all file types  but if the attachment is a zip file then although the saved file will contain the current date/time when saved on the disk, the extracted files from the zip file can maintain the original date/time.  To do this only for the zip file, you can launch the command prompt and type:

unzip filename.zip

This will maintain the original file contained in the zipped folder.  i am using a Windows 10 machine and I have 7-zip installed so the system path contains the unzip command.  If you have problems unzipping from the command prompt then the problem might be something else.

Using GUI to extract zip files will always use the current system date/time so don't use it.

--

With over 999 million devices now running Windows 10, customer satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

[Herb@UK]

On 31/07/2019 03:09, Herb@UK wrote:

Thanks for all the helpful replies, which I'll digest in due course.

Herbert Eppel
www.HETranslations.uk