1318557 - Linkify textual links even in HTML e-mail

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1143768

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Doug Kerr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20161104212021

Steps to reproduce:

Received an HTML messages with a full URL (not encoded as a link) in it.


Actual results:

Suppose I receive an HTML format message that contains a full URL, not encoded as a link, but just as the bare full URL (but the sender nevertheless presumably intends that the recipient be able to "click on it" as a link).

Thunderbird will not recognize from the format that this is a URL and turn it into a clickable link.

If I receive a plain text format message containing a full URL, then Thunderbird will recognize from the format that this is a URL, and converts it into a clickable link. (It of course could not have been put in a plain message encoded as an explicit link.)

I can imagine that the rationale for that behavior was something like this: "Well, this is an HTML-format message, which will support explicitly-encoded links, and if the sender expected the recipient to be able to click on it, he should have put it in as an explicit link. Or his e-mail client should have recognized that he probably meant the URL to be handled as a link, and should have encoded it as a link on the way out."

But I have a few correspondents who don't put the link into an HTML message as an explicit link, and their e-mail client doesn't seem to do so either.

So then I have to take some extra step at my end to be able to go to the site defined by the URL.

The easiest way, if the URL is the only thing in the body, seems to be to do View|Message body as >Plain text. Or else I copy the URL and paste it into the address field of my browser. In any case, it is an annoying extra step for me.


Expected results:

I think that, regardless of the format of the message, when in an incoming message (regardless of format) Thunderbird sees what looks like a valid URL it should turn it into a clickable link.

If there is some reason that this might not always be desirable, then perhaps this behavior should be switchable as a preference

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

(In reply to [e-mail] from comment #0)
> I can imagine that the rationale for that behavior was something like this:
> "Well, this is an HTML-format message, which will support explicitly-encoded
> links, and if the sender expected the recipient to be able to click on it,
> he should have put it in as an explicit link. Or his e-mail client should
> have recognized that he probably meant the URL to be handled as a link, and
> should have encoded it as a link on the way out."
Dead right.

In plaintext e-mail we "linkify" text that looks like a link. And we have many complaints that
- some links are still not recognised
- some links are detected badly (too short)
- some text is detected as link when it isn't a link.

There's no way that we will carry over that compromise to processing HTML. If the sender fails to insert a proper link (anchor) <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org">BMO</a> we won't do it for them.

Comment 2

[Doug Kerr]

Hi, Jorg,

(In reply to Jorg K (GMT+1) from comment #1)
> (In reply to [e-mail] from comment #0)

> 
> There's no way that we will carry over that compromise to processing HTML.
> If the sender fails to insert a proper link (anchor) <a
> href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org">BMO</a> we won't do it for them.

Sounds pretty ideological to me! But I'm sure I don't appreciate the deeper story behind this.

Fortunately, the one sender for which mostly occurs is most often sending me "links" to things I really don't care to see (political diatribes)! They are mostly messages where the body is only the would-be "link" (and with a null subject line), and are forwarded verbatim from his "correspondent", which is where the shortcoming probably originates.

Thanks for filling me in on the situation.

Best regards,

Doug