1136626 - No way to configure colour of reply text in plain email

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Adrian Wilkins]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:35.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/35.0
Build ID: 20150125222008

Steps to reproduce:

Installed a dark theme (TT Deepdark)
Configured mail background to a dark grey
Configured mail text to a light grey
Set mail defaults to plain text
Replied to a mail



Actual results:

Quoted reply text is displayed in a dark blue
This is not clearly visible against the dark grey background

Searched for a way to configure this

* No apparent setting for this in the GUI
* Viewing all the options with "color" in them in about:config reveals no obvious candidate setting

* Screenshotted the window
* Pasted the screenshot into GIMP
* Zoomed in
* Used colour picker to sample the colour of the text
* Text colour is #0200FF
* Searched the following for this hex value
  * about:config   (not found)
  * Source code of TT DeepDark theme  (not found)
  * Source code of Thunderbird (after building)

Only occurs in 

obj-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/intl/icu/target/data/out/tmp/icudt52l_dat.s

Fairly certain this isn't it...
  


Expected results:

There should be a way to configure the quoted reply text colour for plain email.

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to Adrian Wilkins from comment #0)
> Steps to reproduce:
> Configured mail background to a dark grey
> Configured mail text to a light grey
> Set mail defaults to plain text
> Replied to a mail

As clearly stated at panel for Text Color, Background Color, this is for HTML which font size, text color, back ground color etc. can be specified.
As know by setting, there is no such option for Plain Text mail composition, becuse there is no way to specify text color, back ground color etc. in text/plain mail.
In mail display, "style/color/emotion icon for quoted text" can be set.

A way to improve your visibility in composing Plain Text mail.
   Compose mail in HTML mode, and, upon sending, change to Plain Text via Options/Deliverry Format/Plain Text only.

If Reply mail to text/plain mail, above "HTML mode composition" is not applicable, because composer is always invoked in Text Plain mode.

> Expected results:
> There should be a way to configure the quoted reply text colour for plain email.

If mail is saved as Draft and draft mail is viewed, color setting etc. for Text mail is applied.
"Color/stype of Text while composing Text mail" is so importnt even though nothing can be set for text/plain mail?

Comment 2

[Adrian Wilkins]

Attachment: colours dialog

Comment 3

[Adrian Wilkins]

Attachment: blue quoted text

Comment 4

[Adrian Wilkins]

Attachment: choose-own-colour.png

Comment 5

[Adrian Wilkins]

Attachment: do-not-choose-own-colour.png

Comment 6

[Adrian Wilkins]

> there is no way to specify text color, back ground color etc. in text/plain mail.

I'm not talking about the colour of the text (plain text has no colour), I'm talking about the colour used to display the text.

This can be set in 

Preferences -> Display -> Formatting -> Colours

See colours-dialog.png

This also affects the colours in the compose window, as you can see in blue-quoted-text.png

The dark blue against the dark grey background is hard to read, as you can see (or take my word for it). This is why I'd like to reconfigure this colour.

There seems to be an option that might affect this - 

Preferences -> Display -> Plain text messages :
When displaying quoted plain text messages -> Colour

Alas, this only works in display, and not in compose. Compose continues to use #0200FF blue even when you set the colour to that bright yellow. I've so far been unable to isolate the point at which this is set in the source code.

In addition, with "Allow content to choose it's own colours" NOT set, this option has no effect (despite, as we have established, plain text not having it's own colour). See choose-own-colour.png vs do-not-choose-own-colour.png

Comment 7

[ks]

Same problem for me. Exact version: 31.4.0

Comment 8

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

FYI.
If Shift+Reply==Toggle of Compose mode will be supported and if HTML composer window will be opened for reply to text/plain mail, "visibility problem in composing text mail" can be resolved by "compose in HTML, send in text".

Comment 9

[JK]

Same problem for me with Thunderbird for Mac version 31.6.0 - there's no option to change the default display color of quoted text.

Thunderbird for Windows (same version, 31.6.0) behaves differently. On Mac, when I reply to a plain text email, the quoted text is displayed in blue. However, on Windows, the quoted text is display in black. When I hold down the shift key while pressing the reply button (to compose a plain text reply), the display color is blue on both systems. I tested this with "Allow content to choose its own color, instead of my selections above" enabled in Options->Display->Formatting->Colors.

The quoted text colors for plain text replied can be changed by adding a userContent.css file to the profile/chrome directory and defining a stylesheet rule (see https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/User:Floeff/Thunderbird). Unfortunately, I haven't found any info about how to do this for HTML replies.

Comment 10

[Elhem Enohpi]

This is a duplicate of bug 152144.

There's a workaround in bug #159088 comment #13:

Place the following in [profile]/chrome/userContent.css (not userChrome!):

    span[_moz_quote=true] {color: inherit !important; }

"inherit" makes it the same as your default font colour, you can change it to a specific colour if you prefer.