267566 - Send in plain text unless formatting is used in message composition

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Mike Fedyk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1

There are many times where I write to different lists that don't want html to be
sent to the list.  So I add them to the "plain text only" list of domains.

But why is this nessisary?

If I don't use any bold (not counting text encoding of such with ** // and etc),
justification, tables or anything else that would require html formatting, why
does it have to be sent in html?

Note! This would only be an option in addition to "send as plain text only",
"send as html only" and "send as both html and plain text".  Which would mean
send in plain text if no formatting.  If there is formatting, it would send it
html and plain text.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:



Expected Results:  
1. Write message
2. Send
3a. No formatting? Send as plain text.
3b. Formatting? Send as HTML.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

that is what we do, afaik.

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #1)
> that is what we do, afaik.

In my experience, yes, unless all the recipients are listed in the Address Book 
as "prefers [actually meaning, 'able to receive'] HTML."  In recent builds, even 
bolding and italicization are sufficient to count as "formatting."

(And we get complaints about the automatic conversion.  The worst part is that 
if an <img> is included in the message, that is inexplicably not considered 
"formatting" and the image is dropped entirely.  Bug 180997 is about the failure 
to convert embedded images (and other files) to attachments for plain text 
mail.)

Mike Fedyk, do you have a specific example you can point to where the automatic 
conversion to plain does not occur?

Comment 3

[Mike Fedyk]

Actually, I was about to mark this bug invalid since I did a test and it worked
like I wanted it to.

Send to myself without formatting -- Plain text

Send to myself with bolded text -- Plain text & HTML

Sorry for reporting before testing.  You can do what you will with this bug report.

Mike

Comment 4

[Mike Fedyk]

Oh, Before I file another bug...

What do you think of changing the default to "Plain text & HTML" by default?

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

heh, that's an issue that's been much debated over the years, and I'm not
inclined to revisit it :-)