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June 3

qq mail and idiotic downloading behaviour

Hi all, at work, the people at the front desk use qq mail as a mail program. I have no real choice in this. So when I send an attachment to the front desk at work, it downloads with the filename, and appends the number " (1)" at the end. If you download again, it will append a " (2)", etc. So if I send a file called "Hello.txt", it will get saved as "Hello (1)".txt. Worse, there seems to be no way to stop this, so if you manually edit and delete the (1) before saving, it makes no difference. It still saves with the (1) for some reason, because apparently deleting the (1) only changes the record of the download, not the name it ultimately saves to. I find this a kind of preternatural stupidity. Does anyone know what is going on, and how to stop it? I get that not many people use qq mail (it's a Chinese thing), but someone might have, or someone might have seen something similar, and know what is going on anyway. IBE (talk) 10:28, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If you try to save a file named "Hello.txt" in your Downloads folder and there is already a file with that name, it will save it as "Hello(1).txt", to avoid overwriting the existing file. If both "Hello.txt" and "Hello(1).txt" already exist, it will name the new file "Hello(2).txt", and so on. If you want to save the file as "Hello.txt" you need to move, remove or rename the existing "Hello.txt" file first. Generally it's good practice not to keep files in your Downloads folder; rather you should move the file to a more permanent location if you need to keep it, or just delete it after viewing it if you don't need to keep it. CodeTalker (talk) 15:55, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I see, thanks. My computer doesn't do this. Is this because I've set it to ask me every time where to put something? So it doesn't send to downloads folder, and lets me choose (and then accepts my choice of folder, with my choice of filename)? Because if so, the simple solution is just to set the thing not to go to Downloads, but to just ask which folder. IBE (talk) 16:36, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't matter which folder you save to. If there is already a file with the same name in the folder, the same thing will happen. Of course if you're given a choice of destinations, you can choose a folder which you know does not contain a file with that name. Whether you're given that choice or not may be a setting inside qq mail -- I've never used that program so I don't know for sure. CodeTalker (talk) 02:02, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

While I agree with you, note that the normal behaviour with Windows "Save As" menus when the file exists is to give the user a warning that the file will be overwritten with the default option being to reject this and return to the "Save As" menu and rename the file. While automatic renaming is offered when you try to copy or move files, and also generally carried out when you enable auto saving, it actually often isn't even offered when you use a "Save As" menu. Nil Einne (talk) 14:24, 9 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]