1014900 - What/Removed/Added email update formatting

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 665419

(Bugzilla :: Email Notifications, defect)

Description

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

Currently, emails coming from Bugzilla attempt to draw an ASCII-art table with the What/Removed/Added fields and when viewing the HTML-formatted version of the email, these columns never line up. Additionally, when viewing a Bugzilla email on a mobile device, the problem becomes even worse since the table ends up wrapping lines several times to where it becomes impossible to discern the information presented. It would be nice if this information was presented differently in a vertical-scrolling friendly manner such as:

[What]
- [details] ([Added|Removed])

Example:

----

Keywords
- regressionwindow-wanted (Removed)

Attachment #123456 [details] [diff] Flags
- review? (Removed)
- review+ (Added)

----

Just a suggestion. When I'm not at my computer, I find that I have to click-through to the actual bug in my mobile browser to actually see what has changed in a bug since it is almost impossible to read the email updates.

Comment 1

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

Note about Comment 0, the "Attachment Flags" section in my example inadvertently linked to an *actual* Bugzilla attachment, so ignore the trailing "[details] [diff]" portion.

Comment 2

[:glob ✱]

i'm sure this has been reported already, but i can't find the bug right now :)

imho switching to html for bugmail is a much better fix for these sorts of layout issues, especially on mobile.

if you use bugzilla.mozilla.org, you'll find the preference at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/userprefs.cgi#email_format

Comment 4

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

(In reply to Byron Jones ‹:glob› from comment #2)
> i'm sure this has been reported already, but i can't find the bug right now
> :)
> 
> imho switching to html for bugmail is a much better fix for these sorts of
> layout issues, especially on mobile.
> 
> if you use bugzilla.mozilla.org, you'll find the preference at
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/userprefs.cgi#email_format

Thanks! I'll give that a try. Perhaps the emails can simply be sent to support both plaintext and HTML simultaneously by default. That way, it could be left up to the user's email client to determine which version to display.

Comment 5

[David Lawrence [:dkl]]

(In reply to Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc] from comment #4)
> Thanks! I'll give that a try. Perhaps the emails can simply be sent to
> support both plaintext and HTML simultaneously by default. That way, it
> could be left up to the user's email client to determine which version to
> display.

They are. If a user has HTML as their preferred email format, Bugzilla sends the email as
multipart-alternative which included both the text version and the html version. Your
email client can switch between the two.

dkl