136084 - Make mailto form submission uneditable

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect, P4)

Description

[John Keiser (jkeiser)]

When bug 61893 is fixed, form submission to a mailto: address will come up in a
new Compose window.  The user can mess around with the contents as much as he
wants.  In both IE6 (coupled with Outlook Express 6) and NS4.x-Linux, the user
cannot so much as *see* the contents of his form submission, much less edit it.
 While I think it's just fine for the user to be able to see the contents of the
form submit, editing it could destroy the format for servers that depend on that.

To fix this, I suggest bringing up the mail window but making the mail and
subject uneditable.  (I don't really care if the To field is editable; it
doesn't break contract.)

Comment 1

[Nicholas Allen]

I'm not exactly sure I see the issue here.

Are you trying to protect the server from bogus data?  I can already send any 
data I want to the mailto address just by composing a new message.  Making the 
window uneditable only requires someone to copy and paste the message to an 
editable window to get around it.  If a server relies on being sent pristine 
data, they're already screwed and nothing in the browser can protect them.

Or are you trying to protect users from themselves?  If they can edit the To: 
field, that messes it up for them just as much as editing the message.

Comment 2

[John Keiser (jkeiser)]

These are not intended to be freeform emails.  They are encoded in a particular
format.  I want to protect server writers from users *unknowingly* changing the
format.

Comment 3

[Nicholas Allen]

Ok, if the intention is to prevent the user from making boneheaded mistakes 
then I think this would be an effective measure.  I think users should also be 
unable to change the To: field since that too would probably break their form 
submission.  They would still be able to CC or BCC if they wanted a copy to go 
elsewhere?

I just wanted to make it clear that servers absolutely must not rely on any 
behavior in Mozilla so this change would in no way affect server writers.

Comment 4

[Kevin McCluskey (gone)]

Bulk moving P1-P5 un-milestoned bugs to future. 

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

This is not doable in general in the non-suite world, since we have no way to
communicate the "not editable" bit to the mail client we launch, right?  So I
suspect this is a wontfix...

Comment 6

[Till Schneidereit [:till]]

Closing as per comment 5. I also suspect that mailto form submissions are very rare indeed nowadays.