16398 - Support format=flowed (RFC 2646) in mail

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Daniel Bratell]

In Eudora (later versions) a format "flowed" is used to tell the client that
even though the text is wordwrapped, it is one paragraph and one should be able
to change linebreaks to avoid things like:

> Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Really
> long
> row that is an example of the stupid linebreaks caused by
> rows
> getting longer when quoting.

One could use HTML to avoid this but flowed is a better idea since it also makes
the message readable as plain text.

I'm not into all details in the format but I could research it if you think it's
an interesting idea.

What I do know (by looking at messages sent by Eudora) is that they have a
special content-type, for instance:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
or
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

you see the pattern?


I also thinks Hotmail does this.

(Please change the component to a more appropriate, I just guessed.)

Comment 1

[Phil Peterson]

Adding to [HELP WANTED] list and reassigning to [e-mail]

Comment 2

[Daniel Bratell]

I found the specification at
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-gellens-format-06.txt

It's a good thing and I would really like to see it in mozilla. I will look at
this but I don't think I can find the time anytime soon. Is the mime converters
a good place to start?

Comment 3

[Daniel Bratell]

Ok, I want to work on this. Assigning the bug to myself.

Comment 4

[Daniel Bratell]

By the way, it is no longer a draft. See RFC 2646.

Comment 5

[Daniel Bratell]

Attachment: New Mimeclass mimetpfl.cpp

Comment 6

[Daniel Bratell]

Attachment: The headerfile

Comment 7

[Daniel Bratell]

Attachment: A patch to include the new class in mozilla.

Comment 8

[Daniel Bratell]

I attached a libmime class that should make it possible to view format=flowed
mails in the enhanced way. Feel free to test and give me feedback.

Comment 9

[Daniel Bratell]

By the way. To implement this in mozilla would be a possible solution to bug
2916.

Comment 10

[Daniel Bratell]

Attachment: New more correct mimetpfl.cpp

Comment 11

[Daniel Bratell]

The first half (approximately the part in the attachments) checked in by
[e-mail]. (Yes, I confess, I'm the nameless external contributor
mentioned. :-)

Comment 12

[Daniel Bratell]

Just to clarify. I've only done the format=flowed-support part. The new
MimeURLUtils is not something I been involved in.

Comment 13

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Daniel Bratell,
work collosion. You changed major parts of nsHTMLToTXTSinkStream, while I was
working on it (and mad large changes), too. Please stop working at least on that
class until I merged the changes. Thanks. Akk knows about it.

Comment 14

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

see bugs #16507 and 16800

Comment 15

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Daniel,
sorry if I sounded bad in my last comment. I was just a bit frustrated.

Unfortunately, I will need some time, until I finish bug #17723 (added as
dependency). Are there still things to do for you in the sink
(nsHTMLToTXTSinkStream)? Is yes, please tell me, so we can find a solution.

Comment 16

[Daniel Bratell]

With todays checkin (done by Akkana) it should both be possible to send mail
with format=flowed (It's controlled with a pref mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed)
and read format=flowed mail in mozilla.

Comment 17

[pmock]

changing qa assigned to [e-mail]

Comment 18

[pmock]

I sent a e-mail to Daniel asking for his help.  I wrote:
----
Subject: Need help understanding the fix for bug 16398
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 14:24:43 -0800
From: [e-mail] (Peter Mock)
To: [e-mail]
CC: [e-mail]

Hello Daniel,

I attempting to verify bug 16398 "Support format=flowed (RFC 2646) in
mail", but I'm having difficult getting this feature to work.  By
default, any plain text message that is sent has the message
content-type set with format=flow, I have been unsuccessful in getting
the text to flow as specified in RFC 2646.  I've tried to
enabling/disabling the preference mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed and
read format=flowed mail but with no results.  Is this the correct user
preference?

Could you confirm if this feature is still working for you?  I noticed
that [e-mail] is working on bug 17723 which share some of the
same code.

Thank you for your help.
/Peter
 Client Mail QA

Comment 19

[pmock]

I should mention that I was testing with the 2000-01-03 builds.
ftp://sweetlou/products/client/seamonkey/windows/32bit/x86/2000-01-03-09-M13/sea
monkey32e.exe
ftp://sweetlou/products/client/seamonkey/unix/linux_glibc/2.2/x86/2000-01-03-08-
M13/netscape-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
ftp://sweetlou/products/client/seamonkey/macos/8.x/ppc/2000-01-03-08-M13/NSMacIn
staller-M13.sea.bin

Comment 20

[Daniel Bratell]

Reopening, because plain text mail is no longer composed as format=flowed. The 
mails are marked as such, but they are not. There are several other problems 
with plain text composing of mail that may be related to this. There is also 
some problems with the conversion from html to plain text. It is as the mail is 
line wrapped after the conversion even though it is line wrapped already in the 
conversion. As the mail is sent as Quoted Printable the lines has hot a little 
longer so the line wrapping gets strange.

Reading format=flowed mails still works though. 

Comment 21

[Daniel Bratell]

Clearing resolution.

Comment 22

[pmock]

Thank you Daniel for reviewing this bug. :)

Comment 23

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

CC'ed nhotta and myself.

Comment 24

[Daniel Bratell]

When composing with plaintext the outputsink was initialized with mPreFormatted, 
nsIDocumentEncoder::OutputPreformatted and nsIDocumentEncoder::OutputFormatted. 
That combination went through the "just emit what comes in"-path and was 
neither wrapped nor formatted for "format=flowed". I've tried to change so that 
combination goes through the intelligent code path, but I have no idea if that 
breaks anything else. I'll attach the patch for testing.

Comment 25

[Daniel Bratell]

Attachment: Patch that makes plain text mail working including format=flowed

Comment 26

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

Added John M. to CC.

Comment 27

[Daniel Bratell]

Well, it works now. It must have been a temporary thing elsewehere in the code. 
I'll close this as FIXED again.

Comment 28

[pmock]

Verified as fixed on Windows, Linux and Mac using the following:
 Windows commercial seamonkey build 2000-060909-m17 installed on PIII win98
 Linux commercial seamonkey build 2000-060908-m17 installed on PII RedHat 6.1
 MacOS commercial seamonkey build 2000-060908-m17 installed on G3/400 OS 9.04

Comment 29

[pmock]

Forgot to clear status on whiteboard.