1280912 - Support text/markdown (RFC 7763) for composing email

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: MIME, enhancement)

Description

[Christoph Päper]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/601.6.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.1.1 Safari/601.6.17

Steps to reproduce:

Receive an email with `Content-Type: text/markdown` or compose an email using Commonmark/Markdown punctuation markup like *emphasis*, `code` or 

- lists.

Note that MailMate supports `text/plain; markup=markdown` instead, so that should probably also be supported.


Actual results:

text/plain


Expected results:

When the software detects punctuation used for markup purposes in the Compose window it should offer the user to send this email or all future emails with the proper content type header.

If the software receives a mail with such a header, it should render it accordingly, maybe converting it to HTML as an intermediary step.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Let's limit this to composition.

Comment 2

[fred_g_bdx]

Really like the idea! If could also be available for task and calendar composition, would be great.

Comment 3

[mstolarski]

:+1:

Comment 4

[andreas.thalhammer]

I'm really excited about such a feature!

Currently, there are two Thunderbird add-ons which add Markdown:

• Markdown Here (Revival)
• Render Markdown Messages

The first didn't work for me, the later does: when I view a plain text e-mail, it's automatically interpreted as markdown when the add-on autodetects markdown elements.

IMHO Thunderbird should include Markdown (or CommonMark) out-of-the-box. Also, as suggested by Benny Kjær Nielsen in his blog posting Thoughts on Writing Emails using Markdown (Dec 22, 2011, more than a decade ago!), it would be wise to leave Content-Type: text/plain because that's one of the main purposes of Markdown: to keep everything readable as plain text. Adding markup=markdown is probably the best way to do it.

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; markup=markdown

The advantage if Thunderbird supported Markdown/CommanMark as opposed to using add-ons would be that it could include a side-by-side editor: plain-text editing on the left, Markdown (HTML) view on the right. Just like e.g. Ghostwriter (a Qt/KDE App) does it. (In a second step, a Markdown editor on one side and plain-text view i.e. source code on the other side would also be a great enhancement!)

The BIG advantage of included Markdown support is, that clients without it wouldn't suffer at all, since Markdown is designed to be readable as plain text, whereas clients that do support it out-of-the-box would benefit from simple formatting options for everyone, not just geeks who search for add-ons...

Everyone would be happy. Especially me!

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Written in Ghostwriter using Markdown markup formatting