6032 - MIME linkifier should be more aggressive

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: MIME, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Phil Peterson]

When libmime parses messages looking for links, it looks for fully qualified
URLs such as http://www.mozilla.org or mailto:[e-mail].

Increasingly, people are leaving the URL schemes off and just sending
www.mozilla.org or [e-mail]. I think we should make our linkifying code
more aggressive, perhaps keying off "www" for web pages and "@" for email
addresses.

I don't know if there's a lot of danger of false hits here, but we could make
this additional aggressiveness a pref if it seems dangerous.

Comment 1

[rhp (gone)]

I put some work into the code that turns plain text into links.
In the past, we would only turn text into links if it was prefixed
by the protocol (i.e. http://www.blah.com), but now we should
turn the following into links:

 HTTP Url's like      : www.netscape.com  www.mozilla.org/index.html
 FTP Url's like       : ftp.netscape.com  ftp.mozilla.org/file.zip
 Email addresses like : [e-mail]  [e-mail]?subject=blah

If you see weird behavior, please let me know, but I tested a bunch
of variations so I tried to catch the most obvious cases.

Note: We still do not do multiple link links correctly. This is a
considerably harder problem and if I have the chance, I will look
into it.

Comment 2

[lchiang]

This was actually implemented in M6 so I'm going to change the target milestone
to M6.  This way, the bug will reflect that the enhancement was actually made
into M6.

Comment 3

[lchiang]

laurel - can you help me verify this?  Just try the few cases that Rich has
indicated.  More extensive testing will be done later after I write up a test
spec for this feature.  Thanks.

Comment 4

[laurel]

Here's my initial findings using may24 builds on linux and windows (still
working on mac, am having other problems): this fix appears to be generally in,
but there is much that can't fully be verified here.  Here's what I'm seeing:

1.  links appear translated from shortened formats listed by rhp in comments
above for http,mailto and ftp, but only if the message was sent from Messenger
4.x (I used 4.51) to seamonkey.
2.  as indicated above, nothing translated if the message was sent from 5.0
3.  http and ftp links were verified as working in seamonkey when 4.x originated
the message
4.  mailto links could not be verified as they're not generally working in
seamonkey yet
5.  I did notice the translation of incomplete links such as laurel@netscape or
www.foobar.  Do we want to make it appear that this is a (complete) link by
underlining it and changing it to link color (default blue)?  I would think not,
but let me/us know. This may be an issue for a separate bug.

So concensus between Lisa and I is to leave this bug unverified until more is
working in seamonkey link-wise. At that time we will verify for general cases
and open any lingering spinoff bugs. Agreed?

Comment 5

[laurel]

Regarding (my) item #5 above about incomplete links, I see 4.x does translate
such links as mailto:laurel@netscape or http://www.moozilla .

Comment 6

[rhp (gone)]

It sounds like it is "working" the way it should. Keep in mind, this
link-afying will only be applied to plain text messages, not HTML messages. If
you send plain text from 4.5, you will see the link stuff working.

In general, this bug wanted the linkifier to be more aggressive. Will there be
errors, Sure, just like we have had "errors" in the past by not recognizing
www.netscape.com to be a URL. Also, if you send 4.5 a plain text email and put,
http://www.x   it will be linkifyed, even though it shouldn't. In general, it
will do the right thing "most" of the time.

- rhp

Comment 7

[laurel]

Same results on mac using may24 build

Comment 8

[lchiang]

I'm going to mark this verified since the feature is working.  Bugs found from
more testing and from the items Laurel mentioned will be checked/filed later.

Rich - do you plan to do have this linking done for html compose windows?
Thanks.

Comment 9

[rhp (gone)]

You know, I was wrong...this does work for HTML email as well.

- rhp