1273441 - when replying to a mail, only one line of the original is quoted

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Gaetano Giunta]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0
Build ID: 20160502172042

Steps to reproduce:

- receive a mail
- select it in the email list, see it displayed in the bottom panel
- click on 'reply'


Actual results:

in the composition window, only one line of the original mail appears


Expected results:

the whole text of the original mail appears, quoted

Notes:
- on windows, TB 45.1.0

- behaviour has been happening for literally years

- quick workaround is to open the original email in a dedicated window before clicking 'reply'. It works 90% of the time. Sometimes you have to repeat this process two or three times before being able to reply

- I am pretty sure that this bug was reported years ago, but I can not find the original any more

- I hoped that this would be fixed with the changes to the editing control which happened in TB 45, but sadly this did not happen

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Does it also happen in safe mode?
 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/safe-mode-thunderbird

Comment 2

[Gaetano Giunta]

Tested in safe mode, and error is still there.

Attaching a screenshot in case it might help

Comment 3

[Gaetano Giunta]

Attachment: screenshot of error

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

If you're selecting something in the original e-mail, only that will be quoted. Are you sure nothing is selected?

Comment 5

[Gaetano Giunta]

Pretty sure that nothing is selected (at least by me clicking anywhere. If TB is selecting stuff on by back, I dunno ;-) )

Comment 6

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

"e over to the UK so that they could spend ..."
looks like a pretty erratic selection. So you're saying that just clicking onto the e-mail in the thread pane (message list) and then clicking "Reply" will reproduce the error? I've never seen anything like it.

Comment 7

[Gaetano Giunta]

Exact: clicking on the email in the tread pane and then clicking reply is all that is needed to reproduce the bug.
It does not happen every time, let's say once or twice every couple of days, on average of a dozen mails I reply to every day.

I am pretty sure that, when this was first reported, there were a few users who also had the issue. Alas, it seems that I did not subscribe to the original issue, and now it is too hard to find it...

Comment 8

[Gaetano Giunta]

ps: I found this old thread on mozillazine, which seems to also point to a problem with selected text in the main window: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2025497

I can try the suggested solution, to disable the quoting of only-selected-text, and see if this fixes the problem...

Comment 9

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

You're saying that within 48 hours it happens twice on the 24 e-mails you answer, that's 8%. The mozillazine.org reporter talked about 35%.

I answer quite a few e-mails every day since 2010 and I haven't see what you described once. I must admit thought that I mostly select the section I want to reply to.

As I wild guess I'd say that you might be using a laptop and your trackpad is playing tricks on you.

Maybe you could try a right-click on the message in the thread pane and select "Reply" from the context menu. See whether that also causes the error.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Gaetano, can you still reproduce this?

Comment 11

[Gaetano Giunta]

I did not have this happen in a long time, but I reckon it's due to me having set preference mailnews.reply_quoting_selection to false.
I will reset that value and see if this starts happening again...

Comment 12

[Gaetano Giunta]

So far, so good: the problem does not happen any more, except when I accidentally select some text in the email that I want to respond to.
I think we can close this one.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for the update