142439 - replying to digest includes only up to '--' (sig separator)

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Matthew Hannigan]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0rc1)
Gecko/20020417
BuildID:    2002041711

Replying to a digest message (or presumably any message)
only includes text up to '--' at the beginning of a line
The text '--' newline conventionally precedes signature text.




Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. reply to message containing the '--' marker



Actual Results:  quoted replied-to text ends before first '--'
in original


Expected Results:  include the whole lot

Comment 1

[Robert La Ferla]

I am seeing this problem too.  I replied to a digest e-mail then selected "Quote
Message" and it only included the text up to the first "--" line.

Comment 2

[Robert La Ferla]

I am seeing this on Windows 2000 too.  Please update.  Also, what is the status
on  this bug?  Replying to digest e-mail is a pain.  It would be nice if Mozilla
could do it intelligently.

Comment 3

[Chris Schanzle]

Me too.  :-(  Happened with a generic email message with additional
(significant) details below the signature line.

Also note that when viewing the message, all text below the "--" is dimmed. 
This needs fixing as well.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Bug 201581 requests an option not to strip sigs during a reply.
Bug 54570 is about detecting the end of a sig, for purposes of display (viz comment 3) and perhaps also for reply-quoting.

I don't really understand it, myself -- it seems to me that digests should be treated as read-only, not replied to.  Also, multipart/digest is a better way 
to handle them than having one message body with all the digested messages one after another.

Comment 6

[Mike Starr]

I'm not a developer but I was the one who posted 424803. Looking at this issue, it's almost six years old. It would seem to me that after a certain amount of time with no activity or assignment, a confirmed bug's priority and/or severity ought to be escalated automatically. However, that's a Bugzilla issue, not a Thunderbird issue. I'm not changing the severity or priority, as much as I'm tempted to. I am, however, including a portion of my original description from 424803 in this comment:

I did not want to publicly post a link to the digest version of a private email list but I will be glad to save a digest message as a .eml file then as a .zip file and send it for research purposes.

Comment 7

[David Woolley]

Strictly speaking this is "-- " not "--", although I haven't checked that Thunderbird understands that subtlety.

There are two ways of handling mailing list digests.  The modern way is to use MIME digest format.  Thunderbird allows you to extract individual messages from these and reply to them, properly maintaining the In-Reply-To header, needed for threading, and, copying the correct subject, or at least attempting to do so.

If you intend to reply to digest messages and the list offers MIME digests, you should always choose that option, when subscribing.

The older method is less structured, and just involves concatenating messages with a trimmed set of headers, which often do not include Message-ID (generally MIME digests include all the headers and the email user agent filters them in the same way as it does for simple emails).

The big problem with these is that there is no universal way of recognizing them as digests; if you could do that, the best approach would be allow the user interface to select and reply to an individual item, but that would mean extensive heuristics, and maybe rules for many different mailing list managers, and possibly different language versions of them

As noted, often such digests may not include Message-ID headers, as they are not intended to be replied to, and in any case, I don't believe that Thunderbird allows you to manually set an In-Reply-To header.  Thus attempts to reply to them will break threaded views of the list.

In default of recognizing the email as a digest, stripping the signature is good netiquette, and failing to strip it is a common fault, so automatic stripping is a sensible thing to do.  The whole point of using the special hyphen-hyphen-space sequence is so that user agents can recognize it and suppress quoting of the signature.

Comment 8

[Mike Starr]

Unfortunately, users often have little or no control over the exact format of digest they subscribe to.

As I stated previously, I'm not a developer so I don't believe it's my place to be changing priority, severity or status for this bug. I will, however, request developers who are following this issue to consider changing priority of this issue to at least get it to the point where it gets assigned to someone. After six years in the queue, I think it's time somebody actually looked at it and started tinkering with it.

On a related issue, Thunderbird seems to handle signatures differently depending on whether one is originating a new message or replying to an existing message. If I include the delimiter "-- " in the text file Thunderbird fetches my signature from, the delimiter is included when I reply to a message but Thunderbird *adds* the delimiter if I originate a new message so I end up with two delimiters on new messages. If I omit the delimiter from my text file, Thunderbird doesn't add one when I reply to a message so I have to manually enter the delimiter.