1161118 - [email] consider specializing for MMS-gatewayed messages

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::E-Mail, enhancement)

Description

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1159939#c10 for more detail, but long story short:

Problem:
- MMS messages are identifiable via X-Mms-* headers.
- MMS gateways or the messages app themselves seem to be a unique case where given a text/alternative with text/plain and text/html, they will pick the text/plain.
- The FxOS messages (SMS/MMS) app does not understand text/html parts, although other platforms' SMS/MMS apps do seem to understand them, for example, at least Android 5.1 can.

Other info:
- Quoted payloads (both for text/plain and text/html) seem to be left intact by at least the Android messages app, but that seems redundant given the "threaded" UI of SMS/MMS apps.

Things we can do (quoting myself from that comment):
- "The email app could alter its behaviour when it is able to identify that the message originated from an MMS gateway.  In the cases where we have access to the mail headers (IMAP, POP3), we can observe the presence of headers like "X-Mmms-Message-Type" and infer MMS.  In the case of ActiveSync, we could use a heuristic like noticing that given an address like "[e-mail]" that the "local-part" of "55555555555" is all digits; not sure we can rely on the "MMS" part.  If it's an MMS we could do something like alter our reply behaviour to not bother quoting and thus allow us to just reply in plaintext.  We could probably also inhibit the signature since it also seems non-helpful in a text message stream."
- "I suppose the email app could have a hack-fix variant where the front-end uses the all-digits heuristic to just drop to text/plain at the cost of making it 100% impossible for users to reply to messages from all-digit email addresses with quoting."

About to file a bug about us just always including text/plain down-conversions as well.

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on