104788 - Bad quoted-printable style

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010913

I had to look at the way a mail message of mine was put into quoted-printable.

(What actually happened for a reason I still don't understand: The message was
not wrapped according to my column 70 setting, but this is not what this bug is
about.)

I found to ugly things in the implementation of quoted-printable:

1) It happens, that a line ends with = to indication continuation. But the next
line contains exactly one character. So this does make no sense. The first line
has the same lenght with the = or any other character.

2) = is inserted in the middle of words, even if there is some white-space
earlier available.

Even though, both may be correct according to MIME-RfCs, it dramatically
decreases readability for those with non MIME-compliant readers (as Outlook
Express;-).

pi

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

mailnews

Comment 2

[Vadim Berezniker]

reporter, is this still a problem with recent builds?

Comment 3

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

It does for Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020312. I
have no nightly available to check. If you think that some other bug should have
changed something, please let me know which one.

pi

Comment 4

[Sascha Claus]

Can confirm this with Mozilla 0.9.9 {Build ID: 2002031104} on Win98.

Comment 5

[Karsten Düsterloh]

I can confirm this bug on Win2000 with Mozilla 2002032803.

The bug can be duplicated by replying to the post <[e-mail]> in
de.comm.software.mozilla, a result can be found in <[e-mail]>.

The lines (a):

|Es begab sich aber, da=DF Boris 'pi' Piwinger zu schreiben anhob:
|> Kann man jemand mit den neuesten Nightlies, der MailNews nutzt, diesen
|> Bug verifizieren?
|> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3D104788
|> Ich vermute, dass dies OS=3DAll ist, bitte auch das pruefen.
|
|Hm, hast du vielleicht ein nachvollziehbares Beispiel parat?
|
|Karsten

become (b):

|Am 05.04.2002 13:35 aber hob Karsten D=FCsterloh zu reden an und schrieb:=
|
|> Es begab sich aber, da=DF Boris 'pi' Piwinger zu schreiben anhob:
|>> Kann man jemand mit den neuesten Nightlies, der MailNews nutzt, diesen=
|
|>> Bug verifizieren?
|>> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3D104788
|>> Ich vermute, dass dies OS=3DAll ist, bitte auch das pruefen.
|>=20
|> Hm, hast du vielleicht ein nachvollziehbares Beispiel parat?
|>=20
|>=20
|> Karsten

As one can see, an extra empty new line is added after 'denen'. (Apart from
that, the empty lines in (a) become prepended with '> ': a superfluous space is
added.)

(It maybe relevant that I've turned off format=flowed support?)

Comment 6

[Vadim Berezniker]

Where do you see 'denen'?

The space after the angle bracket is there on purpose to differentiate a quote
from escaped text.

Comment 7

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Karsten meant "diesen".

>The space after the angle bracket is there on purpose to 
>differentiate a quote from escaped text.

I don't understand that, but it is a bad idea. Son-of-1036 says:

'This SHOULD be done by prefacing each quoted line (even  if  it  is  empty)
with the character ">".'

No space mentioned there. This is also best standard behavior of practically all
readers which can quote.

pi

Comment 8

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

One more oddity:
Als Link haette ich noch http://piology.org/dsr/linklehre.html anzubieten=
=2E

There is no reason whatsoever to encode a ".". And it only happens in the column
of line break.

pi

Comment 9

[Karsten Düsterloh]

> There is no reason whatsoever to encode a ".". 
> And it only happens in the column of line break.

SMTP interprets lines consisting only of a single dot as the end of an e-mail,
so these have to be encoded.

Comment 10

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Yes, there may be a reason to encode a . alone in the line, but this is the
opposite of this case here, here it only happens in column 70 (or whatever value
you have for line breaking). And it does *not* happen before that position
(except for the first).

pi

Comment 11

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Attachment: Mail showing all the problems

This should sum up all the problems of this bug as seen in 2002040812.

pi

Comment 12

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Setting OS=ALL (see Comment 4 and Comment 5), also confirming.

pi

Comment 13

[Torben]

*** Bug 159537 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***