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I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird to manage my mail, I also set this program to download and save all mail + attachments to my harddrive.

However I have realised a big security issue as when I ran a virus scan recently, My Thunderbird mail directory had around 100 different types of trojans, ransomware, viruses. Some of these appear to be from mail years ago in my inbox.

When manually browsing my mail through a web browser I would never download a .exe type attachments as I am aware of the risk, How can I tell thunderbird to only download .txt, .png, .jpg attachments and ignore the rest.

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  • I wouldn't do this: the extension type is no guarantee of the content, nor that some buffer overflow exploit won't be discovered in the future with the file types you specify. You are better to make sure that your virus scanner checks all e-mails as they arrive, and quarantines any with a virus. Some other extensions, such as ZIP, DOC/DOCX or PDF, may well contain data that you'll want to receive. Also, a good virus scanner will check links in an e-mail, and flag any that take you to suspect sites.
    – AFH
    May 2, 2015 at 13:29

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As you probably know, there is a place in the Options in Thunderbird where you can choose "Always ask" or "Save file." (Tools -> Options -> Attachments -> Incoming.) Since it is apparently impossible to add new file types to the Content Type list, you may want to try this workaround: Note that "when you click an unknown attachment type a dialog opens asking what program and offering to save that setting." (source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1016455) Turn off automatic saving overall, by choosing "Always ask me where to save files," and then download a few files of the target types (.txt, .png, and .jpg). Then you could go into that options screen and hopefully there will be new entries for your three target file types, at which point you could set them individually to "Save file."

But I wonder what's going on with your virus protection. I use Symantec. Whenever I download an attachment, whether it be manual or automatic, Symantec checks it first.

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