1218340 - [Email] quotes appears differently in text mails than in gmail conversation

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[Augustin Trancart [:autra]]

[Steps]
- with thunderbird, send yourself a mail with a bit of content.
- reply to this mail to yourself
- reply a second time to have a 2 level deep quote
- with gmail, also send yourself a mail and reply 2 times.
- Observe the 2 conversations in fxOS mail client.

[expected]
- the quotes looks the same with both conversation

[actual] 
- in the Thunderbird conversation, the nesting is represented with thicker bars.
- in the gmail conversation, the nesting is represented with additional bars.

Comment 1

[Augustin Trancart [:autra]]

Attachment: with thunderbird

Screenshot of a conversation created with thunderbird and viewed with FxOS

Comment 2

[Augustin Trancart [:autra]]

Attachment: mail_quote_gmail.png

screenshots of a conversation created with gmail and viewed with FxOS mail client

Comment 3

[Augustin Trancart [:autra]]

As far as my opinion counts, I prefer the multiple bars over the thicker ones:
- it's more consistent with what other clients do
- it's easier to parse for me (but that could be because I'm used to it)

That being said, maybe we can reduce the space between the vertical bars?

Comment 4

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

The difference in styling is due to gaia email parsing and understanding text/plain in a more sophisticated fashion than for text/html.  The styling is intentional, although I agree things could be greatly improved.  The idea was that the quoting style used by Thunderbird takes up a lot of horizontal whitespace.  Especially in a deeply quoted conversation, it is/was very possible for the multiple bars with whitespace between them to take up much of the display area.

So we intentionally style nested quoting levels with a thicker CSS border instead of nesting them.  The vertical whitespace between quoted sections was done because the quoting analysis logic attempts to eliminate un-needed whitespace so more of the message can fit on the screen, but still providing some vertical separation.

I think there is a lot we could do to improve the styling of quoted messages, especially in supporting clever collapsing of huge runs of quoted text.  And given that we're now targeting displays with resolutions exceeding 320 x 480, the bar-thickness approach may be something that is not needed at all.  (Or maybe we still need it, but it's too ugly/confusing to make that trade-off.)

If anyone is interested in playing with the styling, our CSS rules are at:
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/apps/email/style/message_cards.css#L614

If anyone wants to try using nested div's instead of generating our flattened series of varying-border div's, the logic is here:
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/apps/email/js/cards/message_reader.js#L834

The quote parsing logic that generates the representation we output is here:
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia-email-libs-and-more/blob/master/js/quotechew.js

And the unit tests for that logic are here:
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia-email-libs-and-more/blob/master/test/unit/test_mail_quoting.js

Comment 5

[Augustin Trancart [:autra]]

Thanks for the explanation! That makes sense. 

I'm still worried about the difference of appearance between text/plain and text/html. The average user won't understand that (they don't even know/understand the difference between text/plain and text/html) and they will perceive this difference as a bug, I'm afraid. That being said, maybe it is unavoidable? (Who decides how quotes appears on html mails? Is it the client or the mail?)

Btw this could be a good first bug, WDYT?

Comment 6

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

Indeed, it would probably be better if we unified the display of quotes between text/plain and text/html to the maximum extent possible.

As the rendering agent, the email client displaying a message gets final say on how quoting is displayed, but a lot depends on the clients involved in previous messages in the reply chain.  There are conventions about using ">" for text quoting, and <blockquote> for HTML quoting, but some clients can be buggy or try and be clever with their implementations.  And sometimes users directly type their responses in what is explicitly a quoted region but using just a different font color.

Because of the many nuances and permutations that could arise, I don't think this would make a good first bug.  (It could be a good way for experienced developers with experience with the email problem-space looking to contribute to this app, but that's not the criteria we use for good first bugs most of the time.)

Comment 7

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on