1161126 - [email] Support generating multipart/alternative text/plain down-conversions of text/html messages

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

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

Excerpting: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1159939#c10

"We respond with an HTML email with only a text/html part with the rationale:
- A mail client that sends HTML is going to be capable of processing and displaying HTML.
- Downconversion from text/html to text/plain tends to be hard to get right and frequently ends up looking like gibberish.  For example, Thunderbird's downconversion is now pretty horrible, although I think some of this might be a regression.
- Pretty much the only mail clients that don't natively render/support HTML are those used by users that intentionally use a text-mode UI (ext: mutt) and because of the aforementioned downconversion issue, they're likely to use use something link lynx and its dump mode to get a better fidelity downconversion.
- It's a waste of the user's data and other resources to send a text/plain part that won't be read since we assume the other client will just opt to display the text/html."

Also this decision was made largely as a rationalization to avoiding implementing the complicated/hard process of down-conversion at a very busy time.

In bug 1159939 we've found a notable case (at least to my mind) where an endpoint has sent the user text/html but intentionally is picking a text/plain part over text/html in replies to its message and it makes sense.  (Arguably the gateway should handle down-conversion, but there is something to be said for knowing when you can't do something correctly/well and just avoiding the issue.)

We will absolutely need to implement this when we support HTML composition (bug 1161124), but in the meantime, the MMS case might be a good argument for implementing this earlier than that.  Although note that I've also filed bug 1161118 on us specializing our behaviour for MMS gateways to be more clever in general.

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on