1517956 - Some emails originating from Outlook show up as completely blank due to unclosed HTML comment in header (see comment #5)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Roy Grubb]

Attachment: email.eml

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/71.0.3578.98 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Received email, try to view its contents.


Actual results:

Occasionally - maybe twice a week - an email arrives that appears totally blank. If I copy it to the desktop and open it with notepad++ I can see it does actually have content. Eventually I discovered that if I remove a line starting: 
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; 
then save the file and drag it back into Thunderbird, I can see the content. Not rendered properly, but I can at least see the message, plus metadata, css and html.

To try to resolve this I received and followed advice as in the following thread:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1243850#answer-1184083
None of the suggestions fixed the problem.

I am using Windows 7, fully up to date.  I copied an example of the email concerned to another PC using Win10 with the same version of Thunderbird and the result is the same.  One of the people on the support forum tried it on his machine and saw the same result.

The file attached illustrates the problem.  I have redacted it slightly to preserve the confidentiality of the other party.


Expected results:

The email content should be visible.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

We seem to be having a rash of these reports

Comment 2

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Attachment: email.eml.html

OK, viewing the message as plaintext works: View > Message Body As > Plain Text.
Editing the message as new works as well.

Here's the HTML of the message, FF shows it blank, IE too.

So there's a problem with the HTML of the message. I don't have the time right now to see why noting it displayed. But there's nothing we can do. If you're interested, submit a bug to FF with this document.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

BTW, which "rash" is Wayne talking about?

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

(In reply to Jorg K (GMT+1) from comment #2)
> If you're interested, submit a bug to FF with this document.
But at https://support.mozilla.org/, not here on BMO. Developers don't have time to check why HTML is faulty.

Comment 5

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

HTML displays just fine if you remove this part from the header:

<!--[if /> 9]><xml> </xml><![endif]-- <o:shapedefaults gte mso spidmax="1026" v:ext="edit"><!--[if /> 9]><xml> </o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]-- <o:idmap <o:shapelayout > data="1" gte mso v:ext="edit">

Emilio, you're a "layout guy". Do you know that the effect of this HTML is and why it leads to blank display?

Thanks in advance ... y buena fiesta de Reyes ;-)

Comment 6

[Emilio Cobos Álvarez (:emilio)]

It's an unclosed html comment. The comment starting with "<!--[if /> 9]" has no matching "-->".

Comment 7

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Oh, I didn't see the forest for the trees. Thanks Emilio. I was wondering what the shape* stuff was all about, and we've seen cases were overflows were hidden, content was white on white, or text spacing was zero. So I've been looking for the wrong thing. Yes, clearly, before the </head>, the comment doesn't close. Hmm.

Comment 8

[Roy Grubb]

I'm not sure if fixing this in Thunderbird is possible or it has to be done in Outlook (in which case unlikely). But maybe this will help. I have now done a clean test to give what may be more complete data to work on.

I took one of the emails that under known conditions can demo the issue. I forwarded this to someone and asked them to send it back to me without touching the content - but just hitting Reply.

I have uploaded the original and the round-trip files to
https://www.informationtamers.com/Sights%20Of%20Wonderful%20London.eml
and
https://www.informationtamers.com/Re%20Sights%20Of%20Wonderful%20London.eml

A BeyondCompare file comparison shows how much change the Forward then Reply steps cause to the original email.

There is another source of emails that shows this behavior immediately, i.e. without a round trip. I'll capture that if and when I see it again.

Comment 9

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Attachment: Re Sights Of Wonderful London.eml - Fixed by closing comment

Well, the first mail displays fine, the second one displays empty.

Same problem, there is and open HTML comment in the header:
<!--[if /> 9]><xml> </xml><![endif]-- <o:shapedefaults gte mso spidmax="1026" v:ext="edit"><!--[if /> 9]><xml> </o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]-- <o:idmap <o:shapelayout > data="1" gte mso v:ext="edit">

If I add
CLOSED BY JK -->
to this line, the e-mail displays fine, see enclosed.

What can we do here: HTML is an international standard and a HTML comment is a HTML comment. If you don't close it, your content will be considered comment and not displayed.

Comment 10

[Roy Grubb]

So if it's confirmed that it's purely the result of replying to the original email, I'll report it to MS Outlook and see if they'll pay attention (it's not me that's not closing the comment, of course).

Thanks.